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Crosslistings: WMST 316 |
Jane Austen has long been admired as a preeminent stylist and a discerning cultural commentator whose novels articulate the transition from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism and from a rural-agrarian to a mercantile-imperialist social economy. Recently, Austen's novels have also become object of consumption by a commercial economy whose participants (ourselves) seek to gratify nostalgia for a Laura Ashley version of "the leisured life." As this course will demonstrate, Austen's own life was very far from being leisured; it was instead a history of dignified struggle to affirm herself as an independent gentry woman and a professional writer. The obstacles she faced--economic, social-structural, ideological--rarely led her into self-pity or sentimentalism. If she was sharp in her criticism of patriarchal men, she was equally pointed in her treatment of self-indulgent women. Her novels set a standard that Hollywood has mass-mediated but may also, after all, understand.
Unless preregistered students attend the first class meeting or communicate directly with the instructor prior to the first class, they will be dropped from the class list. NOTE: Students must still submit a completed Drop/Add form to the Registrar's Office.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA COL Grading Mode: Student Option
Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.
Last Updated on MAR-18-2003
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459