ENG 281 - Special Topics in 19th-C American Literature

Special Topic Spring ‘15, Scribblers and Other Novelists: When Nathaniel Hawthorne referred in a private letter to “that damned mob of scribbling women,” he unknowingly created a focal point for recent literary scholarship on the antebellum novel. Hawthorne’s now infamous phrase evokes obvious gender issues, but the context of his comment demonstrates that market competition between authors drove biases, assumptions and even canon itself. In this course we will read many novels by “scribbling women” and by a range of other writers (male and female, popular and “elite,” familiar and unfamiliar) with whom they were in economic as well as literary competition. At issue throughout will be questions of gender and class, tensions between popular and elite cultural production, the role of politics in literature, and canon formation. May be repeatable for credit.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically