English 90gw. Genre Trouble: Twentieth-Century Women's Writing

Instructor: Kelly Rich
Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This seminar studies a diverse set of literatures from twentieth- and twenty-first century British women writers, with particular attention given to the novel. As its title suggests, our conversations will revolve around the relationship between gender and genre, focusing on the ways women’s writing negotiates the very structures and expectations of the novel, as well as on novelistic subgenres associated with women. Our readings will range widely, from domestic fiction, comedies of manners, bildungsroman, historical novel, biographies, romance, and crime fiction. Authors to be considered will likely include Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, Buchi Emecheta, Jeanette Winterson, Helen Fielding, Zadie Smith, and Bernadine Evaristo. These primary works will be supplemented by secondary readings such as court transcripts, diaries and letters, wartime propaganda and Mass Observation studies; key works in literature, sociology, and readership; and scholarship on kinship, race, sexuality, and gender.