English 0674: Feminist Approaches to the Eighteenth Century


Dr. Paula R. Backscheider
9082 Haley Center
pkrb@auburn.edu
(334) 844-9091

Simone de Beauvoir by Toril Moi.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
Cecilia by Frances Burney.
Emma by Jane Austen.
Millenium Hall by Sarah Scott.
Popular Fiction by Women edited by Paula R. Backscheider and John Richetti.
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ.

Jan. 5: Introduction

Recovering and Editing Women's Texts


11:How to Suppress Women's Writing;
Guest: Dr. Judith Slagle, editor of the letters of Joanna Baillie.

13:Margaret Ezell's "Women Writers and Patterns of Manuscript Circulation and Publication" in her The Patriarch's Wife; Joanne Lafler, "The Will of Katherine Maynwaring," Biography 20 (1997): 156-80; Mary Jo Kietzman, "Publicizing Private History" in The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England and continued discussion of How to Suppress Women's Writing.

18:Martin Luther King Day

Reinterpreting Lives


20:Dolores Palamo, "A Woman Writer and the Scholars: A Review of Manley's Reputation," Women and Literature 6 (1978): 36-46; Maureen Mulvihill, "A Feminist Link in the Old Boys' Network" in Curtain Calls; Backscheider, Spectacular Politics, pp. 71-83; Kathryn King, "Poetical Recreations and the Sociable Text," ELH 61 (1994): 551-570; Sue Churchill, "'I Then Was What I Had Made Myself,'" Biography 20 (1997): 72-94.

25:Guest Dr. Anna Battigello, author of Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind; please read pp. 1-84 and 114-16 of her book

Contextualizing Texts


27:Fantomina and all of the footnotes in Popular Fiction by Women; "The Laugh of the Medusa," and other short readings to be announced

Feb. 1: Guest: Dr. Paula McDowell, author of The Women of Grub Street; please read pp. 1-62 and 121-27 of her book, an Elinor James broadside, and a selection from Pope's Dunciad

New Ways of Interpreting Texts


3:Cecilia and Pride and Prejudice

8:Cecilia

10:Cecilia and Pride and Prejudice

15:Guest: Dr. Catherine Ingrassia, author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit; readings from her book.

Difficult Texts


17:The British Recluse in Popular Fiction by Women and Emma

22:Emma and Millenium Hall

24:Emma and Millenium Hall

Tomorrow's Issues


Mar. 1: Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir

3:Readings to be announced

8:Reports

10:Reports

Exam period: reports continue