The Armchair Adventurer:
Popular and Literary Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Prof. Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
Downey House, #300; X3634; sweiner@wesleyan.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 10:15-11:15, Fridays 11:30-1:00, and by appointment
Course description: At the turn of the twentieth century, stories of travel, action, and adventure
enjoyed enormous market success and cultural prominence. This course examines the interaction
between the adventure stories told in popular genre fiction--science fiction, seafaring tales,
historical fiction, adventure stories, detective novels, romance, children's literature, etc.--and
their 'high' literary cousins. In the first half of the course, we will read classic works of genre
fiction in order to understand the appeal of these stories and storytelling modes, for both writers
and readers, and to identify their generic structures, plots, and premises. In the second half of the
course, we will turn to four works of literary fiction that emerged in a close conversation with
these popular forms: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, Henry
James’s The Ambassadors, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
Course Requirements: ten charts (30%); one 3-4 p. essay (30%); one 8-10 p. final paper (40%).
See below for more details.
Foundational course option: Students taking the course with this option will receive more
extensive and detailed feedback on their work through more frequent writing assignments and
individual meetings with the instructor. Foundational courses are intended to provide an
additional level of guidance, support, and feedback to ensure that students cultivate the tools and
skills necessary for graduate level research and writing.
Course Outline
Wed. Sept. 10: Elsewhere: imperial romance and science fiction
 Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
 Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
Wed. Sept. 17: Elsewhen: historical Romance; the romance / realism debate
 Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886)
 James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884) (moodle)
 Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884) (moodle)
 Lang, “Realism and Romance” (1887) (moodle)
Wed. Sept. 24: Crime and detection
 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1888)
 Hornung, “The Ides of March,” “Gentlemen and Players,” The Amateur Cracksman
(1898) (moodle)
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Wed. Oct. 1: Comedy
 Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1917)
Wed. Oct. 8: Gothic Horror; classic structuralist accounts of romance and comedy
 Hardy, “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (1891) (moodle)
 Nesbit, “Hurst of Hurstcote” (1893) (moodle)
 Frye, “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy” and “The Mythos of Summer: Romance,”
Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (moodle)
 Bakhtin, from The Dialogic Imagination (1975) (moodle)
 bring King Solomon’s Mines, The Time Machine, Kidnapped, A Study in Scarlet, The
Amateur Cracksman, and Piccadilly Jim to class
Wed. Oct. 15:
 ESSAY DUE
 Conrad, Lord Jim, ch. 1-20
Wed. Oct. 22
 Conrad, Lord Jim, ch. 21-45 and “Author’s Note”
Wed. Oct. 29
 Forster, A Room with a View (1908), ch. 1-10
Wed. Nov. 5
 Forster, A Room with a View, ch. 11-20
 Meredith, “On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877) (moodle)
 James, The Ambassadors (1903), books 1-2 (do not read the “Preface” yet)
Wed. Nov. 12
 James, The Ambassadors, books 3-8
Wed. Nov. 19
 James, The Ambassadors, books 9-12 and “Preface”
 Kipling, Kim (1901), chapters 1-4
Wed. Nov. 26 – Thanksgiving break: no class
Wed. Dec. 3
 Kipling, Kim, chapters 5-15
Sat. Dec. 13, 5:00 p.m. : FINAL PAPER DUE
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Charts Assignment
This assignment involves creating a chart and writing about the insights it yields.
The chart can be any sort of graphic representation consisting of words, circles, squares,
and/or lines—a diagram, a map, a chart with an X and Y axis, a Venn diagram, a tree diagram, a
timeline, a table, an outline, etc.
The page of prose accompanying your chart need not be a formal essay with a thesis,
evidence, and analysis. Instead, you should meditate on what you learned by making the chart
and now see by looking at it. These meditations should be about three-quarters of a page to a
page long, single-spaced. Feel free to meander, to consider divergent implications, to ask
questions. The vital thing is to spend a bit of time examining the chart.
Ten of these chart/meditations are due over the course of the semester. You may choose
on which weeks you’d like to take a “bye”.
Here are some ideas to help you get started, but don’t feel bound to stick within them—
any kind of graphic representation is most welcome. We’ll also be talking a lot about structures
and methods of narration, which should give you more ideas for charts as the semester unfolds.
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Structure
o Show where, with whom, and/or in what ways the book (or a chapter) begins and
ends, and how it gets from start to finish.
o Show how the “core plot” is framed. What comes before and after?
o Show how the “back story” is presented.
o Indicate how the first chapter generates vectors for later developments at the level
of theme, character, and/or story. Do these vectors align in a single direction or
shoot out variously?
o Characterize and chart pivotal events. Where and when do they take place? Are
there patterns in the way events are organized across chapters, parts, the book as a
whole? Are they evenly spread out, or do they cluster?
o Use a tree diagram to illustrate the complex ramifications of a pivotal event.
o Show how events or sorts of events are repeated. Do things come in threes as in
fairy tales? Does a sequence of repeated events develop or resist development?
Time
o Pay attention to the congruence and/or incongruence of the temporal sequence of
the story and the order in which it is actually told on the page.
o Show how quickly or slowly time moves within one or more chunks of text.
Place
o Create a table or Venn diagram breaking down what sorts of characters appear,
and what sorts of events take place, in various locations.
o Map the story, or a character, as it moves in space. Where does it/he/she go?
o Map what happens “on stage,” and what happens “off stage,” and how the two
sorts of events are brought into the story.
Character
o Illustrate a character (or several characters’) journey over time with a timeline or
a chart where Time runs along the X or Y axis.
o Show how two or more characters are foils for one another.
o Show the relationship between characters’ intentions and actions on the one hand
and the plot on the other hand. Do intentions and actions matter? How or how
not? Do characters primarily act or react?
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Narrative method
o Pay attention to the author’s use of various methods of telling a story—narrator
reporting, dialogue, a quoted letter or other document, first person story-telling
embedded within a third-person narration, the free-indirect style (i.e., the
narrator’s filtered reporting of a character’s inner thoughts and feelings), etc.
o Diagram the expertise, methods, style, etc. of the narrator/s. How do they know
what they know about the stories they tell? What sorts of expertise do they bring
to their storytelling? Are there auditors or readers, and if so, who—and where and
when—are they?
Essay Assignment
The topic and approach of this essay is entirely up to you, but it should focus on one or
more of the books in the first half of the syllabus, i.e. up to the gothic stories. The essay is short
(3-4 p.) and so should be fairly tightly focused, but that doesn’t mean you need to examine only
one book. You could compare two or more novels according to any of the narrative methods that
you discovered in your charts or that we discuss in class.
Final Paper Assignment
The topic and approach of this essay are again up to you, but it should focus on one or
more of the books in the second half of the syllabus, i.e. Lord Jim and after. You should feel free
to incorporate material from earlier, but the main thrust of the argument should be directed to
one or more of these four texts.