ENGLISH 61N: Jane Austen's Fiction

Course Description

Austen's finely wrought novels were unlike any previous fiction, offering an intensely realized example of literary originality. This class focuses on Austen's major writing, all published in a remarkable ten year period. These novels - including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion - have had a profound impact on the development and understanding of the novel as an art form. We'll take the measure of Austen's inventiveness and her subtle, engrossing experiments in narrative voice, fictional character, representation and literary form. Our two goals will be to closely engage each novel (looking at the major interpretative and aesthetic questions that are generated) and to track the rich dialogue that takes place between her different texts when they are read together.