BA in English
Year 1 Modules, 2014-2015
Texts in Time 2 (teaching block 2, spring)
Convenor:
Dr Sam Cooper
Course codes:
Texts in Time 2 Q3124
Level and credits:
Texts in Time 2 30 credits at level 4
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General Information
Module Description
What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and
the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways
in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and
other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study
of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own?
These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during these modules. Texts in
Time 1 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as well
as visual texts (photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural contexts. Texts in
Time 1 is divided into three blocks. The first block (weeks 1-4) addresses texts from the
nineteenth century, the second block (weeks 5-8) focuses on Modernist texts. The final block
(weeks 9-12) looks at contemporary writing and culture. Most weeks bring a new text or texts
into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an overarching theme. Note there
will be no teaching in week 7, which is a reading week.
Texts in Time 2 continues your study of many different kinds of texts – poetry, plays, letters,
prose fiction, a novel, as well as visual texts – but from earlier historical periods. The module
comprises two weeks on Medieval texts (weeks 1-2), four weeks focusing on the early modern
period (weeks 3-6), and four weeks on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, from 17001830 (weeks 8-12). Most weeks bring a new text or texts into consideration, but all are
connected to the overarching theme of the module: ‘Citizens and Strangers’. Again, note that
there will be no teaching in week 7, which again is a reading week.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of Texts in Time 1, a successful student will be able to:
 Demonstrate a developed understanding of relationships between literary texts and their
historical contexts.
 Offer sustained analysis of literary texts from a number of historical periods.
 Show developed critical and close reading skills in written responses to module material.
By the end of Texts in Time 2, a successful student will be able to:
 Demonstrate a developed understanding of relationships between literary texts and their
historical contexts.
 Display an ability to discuss relationships between literary texts of a shared historical
period.
 Participate in group work to produce a project on themes addressed by the
course.Participate in seminar discussion on themes addressed by the course.
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Assessment
Each module is assessed by a portfolio of writing exercises, an essay and an exam. Definitive
assessment information for both modules, including exact submission deadlines, will be
published on Sussex Direct.
Teaching
Both modules are taught via 1 x 1hr lecture, 1 x 2hr workshop, and 1 x 2hr seminar per week.
Details of the texts and topics for the lecture and seminar discussion each week are given
further on in this handbook. The workshops each week will include a variety of activities
focused on that week’s reading, to support your preparation for the week’s seminar; it also
addresses academic, writing and study skills. A document giving details of the workshops for
each semester will be available on Study Direct. You should note that preparatory exercises are
required in advance of some workshops.
You should be sure to do the core reading (including core secondary reading, usually one or two
chapters or articles) in advance of your lecture, workshop and seminar each week. In many
cases, we hope to make copies of the core secondary reading available online, either via the
Library reading lists function, or via the Texts in Time 1 or 2 Study Direct sites. You should
acquire your own copies of the core primary reading: all the relevant books are listed
separately at the end of this document, as well as being given in the detailed module outline
below. The recommended secondary reading listed for each week offers some suggestions for
further reading. This will be helpful in developing your thinking each week, and in preparation
of essays. Remember, there are further resources available in the library – more than we can
list here – do browse the shelves and search the catalogue to find criticism and contextual
studies which help you to develop your particular interests. There will also be a Study Direct site
for both modules, where further resources will be made available.
Attendance Requirements
Texts in Time 1 (autumn semester) and Texts in Time 2 (spring) both involve one one-hour
lecture, one two-hour seminar and one two-hour workshop each week. Details of times and
venues will be notified via Sussex Direct. You will be in the same group of students for your
workshop as for your seminar.
You are expected to attend workshops, seminars and lectures. If you miss a workshop or
seminar because of illness or for other good cause, you should email the tutor and
‘englishattendance@sussex.ac.uk’ in advance of the class. If your attendance is unsatisfactory,
you will receive a formal letter of warning from your tutor. If you continue to miss classes without
good reason, you will be required to attend a meeting with a member of the School
Management group. Students encountering difficulties affecting their ability to attend seminars
and workshops should seek help, advice and support from their academic advisors and/or the
Student Life Centre.
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Core Primary Reading
PLEASE NOTE: You are expected to have a copy of the week’s core reading with you
during your seminars and workshops. Where no particular edition is specified, you are
welcome to use any good-quality scholarly edition (but avoid cheap editions, which may be
abridged and will lack scholarly notes).
Where a core text appears in the module outline but is not included in the lists below, copies of
required material will be made available and/or details will be given of how the text can be
located or accessed online. Core and Recommended Secondary Reading for each week
is listed in the detailed module outline.
For Texts in Time 2

Shakespeare, William (ed. J.W.Lever). Measure for Measure. London: Arden, 2008.

Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker (ed. Elizabeth Cook). The Roaring Girl.
London: A & C Black, 2003.

Wycherley, William, The Country Wife (available in New Mermaids or OUP)

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. (Various suitable editions, e.g. OUP and Penguin)

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (Various suitable editions, e.g.
OUP and Penguin)

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (Various suitable editions, e.g. OUP and Penguin)
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Texts In Time 2
Teaching block 2 (Jan-April 2015)
Block 1: The Medieval past
The first two weeks of this module explore medieval texts. Both are linked to themes of remains:
physical, bodily, but also literary. The texts raise questions about our relation to the medieval
past, and to history in general, but they also explore the attitudes of medieval texts and culture
to their own pasts. Please note: a ‘Guide to Reading Middle English’ will be available on Study
Direct.
Week 1
Lecture: Medieval texts and literary remains: St Erkenwald
Katie Walter
Core text

'St Erkenwald', in A Book of Middle English, 2nd edn. ed. J.A. Burrow and Thorlac
Turville-Petre (Blackwell, 1992, 1996), pp. 201-214
This lecture takes as its focus one fourteenth-century alliterative poem, St Erkenwald--set in
London and treating the discovery of a body in the process of carrying out building work on St
Paul's cathedral. The lecture explores how this text might be used to explore our responses to
the literary remains of the medieval past. It will address, in particular, ideas about marvel,
discovery, archaeology, and the archive as lenses for critical responses to literary texts.
Core Secondary Reading

Federico, Sylvia, 'Late-Fourteenth-Century London as the New Troy', from New Troy:
Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (University of Minnesota, 2003), pp. 1-28

Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 'St. Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles', in Studies in Late
Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in honour of John Scattergood: 'The Key of all
Good Remembrance', ed. Anne D'Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2005), pp. 362-74.

Scattergood, John, 'St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past', from The Lost Tradition:
Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp.17999.
Recommended secondary reading



Chism, Christine, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002)
Grady, Frank, 'St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament', Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 22 (2000): 179-211
Otter, Monika, 'New Werke': St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and The Medieval Sense of the
Past', Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24.3 (1994): 387-414
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
Schwyzer, Philip, 'Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: From St. Erkenwald to Spenser in
Ireland', Representations 95.1 (2006): 1-26

Smith, D. Vance, 'Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable', New
Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 59-85.

Turner, Marion, 'Idealism and Antagonism: Troynovaunt in the Late Fourteenth Century',
from Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London
(Clarendon: Oxford, 2007), pp. 56-92
Week 2
Lecture: Literary remains and medieval culture: The Awyntrs off
Arthur
Katie Walter
Core text

The Awntyrs off Arthur, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn
(Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995)

Also available online: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awnintro.htm
Continuing the focus on bones, bodies and material remains as a means of engaging with the
medieval literary past, this second lecture takes up The Awntyrs off Arthur, a hybrid poem
charged with violating 'all canons of artistic unity', to explore some of the uses - political, moral
and poetic - to which the histories and fictions of Arthur and Guinevere are put in late-medieval
English culture.
Core Secondary Reading

Hanna, Ralph, III, 'The Awntyrs off Arthure: An Interpretation', Modern Language
Quarterly 31,(1970): 275-9

Twu, Krista Sue-Lo, ‘The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne: Reliquary for
Romance’¸ Arthurian Literature, xx, ed. Keith Busby and Roger Dalrymple (Brewer,
2003), pp. 103-122
Recommended Secondary reading





Chism, Christine, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002)
Klausner, David N., 'Exempla and The Awntyrs of Arthure', Medieval Studies 34 (1972):
307-25
Philips, Helen. ‘The Ghost’s Baptism in The Awntyrs of Arthure’, Medium Aevum 58.1
(1989): 49-58
Evans, Michael, The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England (Hambledon,
2003)
The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. E. Archibald and Ad Putter
(2009)
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Block 2: Citizens and Strangers, Part 1: 1590-1675
In this block of the module, we shall be focusing on texts from the early modern period.
Works by William Shakespeare, Isabella Whitney, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
and others, will enable us to consider representations of the city of London, the roles of
religion, gender and sexual identity, and the relationship between literary writing from the
past and that of today. Each of these in turn offers its own perspective on identity, belonging,
and strangeness.
Week 3
Lecture: Sex and the City: Fornication and Justice in Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure (1604)
Professor Charles Nicholl
Core Text

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed., J. W. Lever (Arden Shakespeare,
London, 2008). Please also read Lever’s Introduction, especially pages xxxixcviii.
Though famously elusive -- one of the so-called ‘problem comedies’ -- Measure for
Measure is also a highly topical play. In this lecture I look at how the play addresses particular
and precise issues relevant to the playgoer of 1604. Shakespeare is reflecting a mood of
political uncertainty and transition as a new king takes the throne. He is strongly influenced by
the French sceptic Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays appeared in English translation in
1603. Probing the assumptions and values of the age, Measure for Measure is itself a kind of
Montaignian ‘essai’ (literally, a testing) on such subjects as justice, good government, sexual
morality, public health. Shakespeare is also reacting -- as he always must -- to the imperatives
of theatrical fashion, and the challenge of younger and brasher authors like Ben Jonson and
Thomas Middleton, and the play, though nominally set in Vienna, is full of the textures of
London life.
Core Secondary Reading

Lever’s Introduction, especially pages xxxi-xcviii; and Leah Marcus, Chapter 4,
‘London’ in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), pp. 160-211
Recommended Secondary Reading



Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (Allen Lane; Penguin, 2007)
David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds, Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: Routledge, 1991). This
contains accessible short essays on the place of the stage, theatre-goers, censorship
and a succinct introduction to shifts in critical approaches to early modern drama.
Jean Howard, ‘New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’ in Russ McDonald, ed.,
Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004). [This seminal essay is also available in a number of other collections]
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Week 4
Lecture: Community and Estrangement in Renaissance Poetry:
John Donne and Isabella Whitney
Chloe Porter
Core Texts



Donne, Holy Sonnets 14, 18; Satire 3.
Whitney, Will and Testament.
These texts will be available on Study Direct in advance of the lecture.
This lecture will consider the varieties, complexities, and strangeness of early modern
religious experience. It will explore the Reformation background and how we might approach
the Catholic/Protestant split through literary texts, especially in relation to Donne. His Holy
Sonnet 14 is a poem which always surprises students, if only for the final couplet; we will
also consider Sonnet 18, some earlier love poetry, and ' Satire 3'. Donne also enables us to
address issues around community in relation to questions of readership and coteries, picking
up the ‘London’ theme of last week. In this regard we will look at Donne alongside Isabella
Whitney, the first woman under whose name a complete volume of original, secular poetry was
published in English.
Core Secondary Reading



Marotti, Arthur, ‘Donne as Social Exile and Jacobean Courtier: The Devotional Verse
and Prose of the Secular Man’, in Critical Essays on John Donne (New York: G. K.
Hall, 1994), pp. 77-101
Travitsky, Betty, ‘The 'Wyll and Testament' of Isabella Whitney’, English Literary
Renaissance, 10 (1980), 76-94
Recommended Secondary Reading












Guibbory, Achsah, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare,
Donne, and their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious
Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)
Marotti, Arthur F., ed., Critical Essays on John Donne (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994)
Martz, Louis, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)
Selleck, Nancy, ‘Donne’s Body’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 41 (2001),
149-74
Smith, A. J., The Metaphysics of Love: Studies in Renaissance Love Poetry from
Dante to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Stubbs, John, Donne: the reformed soul (London: Viking, 2006)
Wall, Wendy, ‘Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy’, English Literary History, 58:1
(1991), 35-62
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Week 5
Lecture: Sex and the City 2: Performing Identity in The Roaring Girl,
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611)
Margaret Healy
Core Text

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl ed. Elizabeth Cook (New
Mermaids, A & C Black, 1997 – new reprint 2003). Please also read Cook’s
Introduction – especially pp. xxvi-xxxvi.
This lecture will focus on two different aspects of The Roaring Girl – first, the ways in which it
dramatises Jacobean London and the ways its various citizens move though it; and second, the
nature of the ‘strange citizen’ that is Moll, the ‘Roaring Girl’. She occupies a centrally important
place in the economy of the play and of the Jacobean London it presents. Through her I want
to discuss notions of cross-dressing and early modern gender and sexuality, how Moll defies
easy categorization, and finally question whether she affirms or challenges dominant Jacobean
attitudes. We may also have time to discuss the anonymous text, Haec- vir Or the WomanishMan (1620).
Core Secondary Reading


Jane Baston, ‘Rehabilitating Moll’s Subversion in The Roaring Girl’, Studies in English
Literature vol. 37 no. 2 (Spring 1997) pp. 317-335.
Jean E. Howard, ‘Cross-dressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern
England’, in Lesley Ferris ed., Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing
(London, Routledge: 1993) pp. 20-46.
Recommended Secondary Reading








Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983).
Clare McManus, ‘The Roaring Girl and the London Underworld’, in Garrett A.
Sullivan, Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield eds, Early Modern English Drama: A
Critical Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) pp. 213-224.
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720
(Oxford: Clarendon, 2000)
Susan Zimmerman ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London:
Routledge, 1992), especially chapter 2.
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature
of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984).
Week 6
Lecture: Restoration Comedy: William Wycherley’s The Country Wife
Tom Healy
Core Text

William Wycherley, The Country Wife
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This lecture explores Wycherley’s 1675 comedy, a product of the theatrical culture of the
Restoration period that opposed the moral and religious puritanism that dominated London
during the Civil War and Cromwellian interregnum (1640-60). The play – considered sensational
even by the relaxed standards of its day - combines sexual explicitness and social satire with
linguistic play and commentary on class, religion, and gender relations. Courtly/cosmopolitan
sexual libertinism challenges middle-class moralism in a play which, despite turning on
heterosexual relations, has also been read as an investigation of homosociality.
Core further reading


Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Gender, literature and gendering literature in the Restoration’, in
Stephen Zwicker, editor, Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 58-81.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A letter from Artemisa in the Town to Chloe in the
Country’ (c.1669).
Recommended secondary reading







Helen M. Burke, ‘Wycherley's 'Tendentious Joke': The Discourse of Alterity in The
Country Wife’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29: 3 (Autumn 1988) pp. 227-41
Edward Burns, Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity (Macmillan, 1987)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Country Wife: Anatomies of male homosocial desire’, in
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, pp. 49–66. New York:
Columbia University Press (1985)
Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (1995), esp. Introduction and chapter 1, ‘Hobbes and the Libertines’.
H.W. Matalne, ‘What Happens in The Country Wife, Studies in English Literature, 22.3
(1982), 395-411.
Deborah C. Payne, ‘Reading the Signs in The Country Wife, Studies in English
Literature, 26.3 (1986), 403-19.
Gerald W. Marshall, ‘ “Great Stage of Fools”: Madness and Theatricality in The Country
Wife, Studies in English Literature, 29.3 (1989), 409-29.
Week 7 Reading week
There will be no lecture or teaching this week.
Block 3: Citizens and Strangers, Part 2, 1700-1818: Home and
Away
The second block of the course, from weeks 8 to 11, takes us to a new historical period, from
the eighteenth century through into the Romantic period at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Our theme, ‘Citizens and Strangers’, continues, but a focus on London begins to turn
outwards, as we consider Britain’s relationship with outsiders, especially through travel (Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu’s travels to Turkey). The imaginative potential of the strange or foreign
is also exploited in two very different fictional works: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where the
imagined ‘otherness’ of Lilliput and Brobdingnag offer a way for Swift to comment on matters
nearer to home, and in the icy alienation of the Alps and the Arctic, two evocative landscapes
of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Finally, notions of belonging, community, and strangeness,
which are at the heart of Frankenstein, are addressed with respect to women’s place in society,
in Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel, The Wrongs of Woman. By placing the experience of the
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alienated woman at the heart of her novel, Wollstonecraft counters the ‘othering’ of women as
strange, even monstrous, beings, which is present throughout eighteenth-century culture, and
strongly evident in Swift’s writings.
Week 8
Lecture: Writing the City - Home and Away: Swift and Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu
Catherine Packham
CoreTexts




Swift, ‘A Description of the Morning’; ‘A Description of a City Shower’; ‘Stella’s
Birthday, 1721’, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’; ‘The Lady’s Dressing
Room’
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem
Called 'The Lady's Dressing Room'’
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, selected letters from her Turkish Embassy Letters
Core texts will be made available on Study Direct before the lecture.
Representations of London run through texts in the earlier part of this course, but how is the
city experienced for writers at the beginning of the eighteenth century? This lecture considers
the way two very different poets, Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu represent the
early eighteenth century city, and the various sights and scenes it offered to the onlooker.
Swift’s poems experiment with a newly prosaic literary language to reflect the new modernity of
London, but his apparently disinterested observation at times becomes disturbingly
judgemental – especially when his sights are trained on women. Lady Mary’s letters, written
when accompanying her husband on a diplomatic visit to Turkey, offer an alternative view: not
only of cities very different from London, but of a woman’s view of female bodies and beauty.
Core Secondary Reading


‘The Epistemology of the Dressing Room: Experimentation and Swift’, Chapter 5 in
Tita Chico, Designing Women: the Dressing Room in Eighteenth Century Literature
and Culture, (Bucknell University Press, 2005)
Mary Jo Kietzman, ‘Mary Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation’,
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 38:3 (1998), 537-551
Recommended Secondary Reading



‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and
Levantinization’ Srinivas Aravamudan ELH, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 69-104
‘Swift Among the Women’, Margaret Ann Doody, The Yearbook of English Studies,
Vol. 18, Pope, Swift, and Their Circle Special Number (1988), pp. 68-92
‘Swift the Poet’, Pat Rogers, in The Cambridge Companion to Swift, ed. Christopher Fox
(Cambridge University Press, 2003)
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Week 9
Lecture: Gulliver’s Travels
Tom Healy
Core text

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. (Please use a good scholarly edition eg OUP or
Penguin, as some cheaper editions are abridged).
This lecture address Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to explore representations the relation between
travel, identity and cultural dislocation, and the nature of Swift’s exploitation of print culture.
We will also be broaching some more political concerns: addressing Swift’s satire, his
engagement with contemporary politics, his attitudes to trade, acquisition, commodities and
war, and to empire, power, and enslavement.
Core Secondary Reading

Howard Erskine-Hill, Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (Cambridge University Press,
1993)
Recommended Secondary Reading




Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Ian Higgins Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth Century English
Literature (Cornell University Press, 1993), Chapter 6 ‘Imperial Disclosures: Jonathan
Swift’
Week 10
Lecture: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
Catherine Packham
Core Text

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, was left incomplete following
Wollstonecraft’s early death giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. The novel explores the
position of women in late eighteenth century society, and exposes the many oppressions –
social, financial, sexual – under which they suffered. Wollstonecraft’s forensic attention to
gender, and to the heterosexual relation enshrined in marriage, offers a new perspective on
notions of community and belonging already explored in the module. It anticipates themes –
belonging, alienation, social oppression and exclusion, the role of sympathy – which Mary
Shelley would revisit in her novel, Frankenstein. Like that novel, it also experiments with a
complex narrative structure, which gives voice to different characters in turn, to investigate the
affective power of self-narrated personal testimony.
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Core secondary reading

Mary Poovey, ‘Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman’, in her The Proper Lady and the
Woman Writer (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 94-113
Recommended secondary reading



Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge
University Press, 2003)
Claudia Johnson, ‘Embodying the Sentiments: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman’, in
Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of
Chicago Press, 1995)
Janet Todd, ‘Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’,
Frontiers 5:3 (1980), 17-20
Week 11
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Amy Milka
Core Text

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (please use a good scholarly edition, such as OUP or
Penguin Classics. Cheaper texts are often problematically abridged and lack notes.)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its tale of Frankenstein’s creature caught in a hinterland
between belonging and alienation, humanity and monstrosity, offers a final meditation on the
themes of this course. This lecture will put Shelley’s novel in its literary-historical context by
considering its relationship to other Gothic fiction, and consider the centrality of monstrosity to the
novel’s design.
Core Secondary Reading
 H. L. Malchow, ‘Frankenstein's Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century
Britain’, Past & Present, No. 139 (May, 1993), pp. 90-130
Recommended Secondary Reading





Stephen Bann, Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (Reaktion, 1994)
George Levine The Endurance of Frankenstein (University of California Press, 1982)
Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century
Writing (Oxford University Press, 1987)
Paul Cantor Creature and Creator: Mythmaking and English Romanticism (Cambridge
University Press, 1984)
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (University of Chicago Press,
1984)
Week 12
There will be no new material studied in week 12. Workshop and seminar time will be used as
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decided by tutors.
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