Events Calendar

This course is designed to introduce you to the people behind the works of history you read or encounter in the many media in which you encounter them today, as well as to help you understand the epistemological and professional challenges historians face, how they face them, and the many reasons they do so. The purpose of the course is to help you understand the ways in which historical understanding grows from a combination of individual lives, minds, social circumstances, and historical times in a kind of never-ending dance between life, thought, and felt need.

Together, we will read works by two of the giants of 18th Century fiction, Samuel Richardson (Jane Austen's favorite novelist) and Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones). Richardson's Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) was the first runaway bestseller in English fiction. Fielding responded to Pamela's form, themes, and arguments in two very different ways, a short parody, Shamela (1741), and a longer novel, Joseph Andrews (1742).

Some topics of discussion: ambition and artlessness; virginity and virtue; sexual, romantic, and spiritual passion; desire, love, and marriage; received ideas about and redefinitions of masculinity and femininity; class mobility, political allusions and analogies, and the relation of the lower classes to the aristocracy; religion; gender and genre; the epistolary novel; 1st vs 3rd person narration; sentiment and sincerity vs parody and satire; text vs paratext (prefaces, letters, epigraphs, notes); the author's relationship to his audience; promotion, reception, and literary celebrity.

This course will read and discuss six novels by Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972), Celestial Navigation (1974), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020). Please read The Clock Winder before the first meeting. You can read any edition--there are several different paperbacks of each novel--but try in each case to get the Knopf hardcover if you can, so that we can cite passages in discussion by page number. Abebooks.com has a lot of copies, priced usually around $5, and your local library should also be a good resource. Please commit to reading each book on time.