reading list: 18th c. British novel

[heresluck]

As requested by brisingamenThe guiding principle I'm currently interested in for this class is the idea of the 18th c. as a sort of genre soup. All sorts of disparate genre elements (prose romances, the epistolary tradition, epic, crime journalism, satire, political and historical drama and narratives, travel narrative, picaresque, memoir, spiritual

Comments

[heresluck]

You're absolutely right: reading Clarissa over the summer would be ideal. Unfortunately, it's not something I can rely on; schools don't all do enrollment the same way, for one thing, and not all curriculum committees would approve of a requirement that could significantly lower enrollment. So while I can plan a syllabus that would do that, I also need multiple fallback plans.

And yeah, the unintentional hilarity. One of my classmates reduced us all to hysterical laughter one day by whipping out his calculations of how much paper C. would have used, assuming she crossed letters but also counting all the drafts she mentions: how many POUNDS of paper, and how often cartloads of it would have had to be delivered to her house and to the brothel. I nearly ruptured something laughing.

The Wollstonecraft is definitely a thought, although I feel about her much the way I feel about Swift: she's an important thinker, but not as important to the *novel* specifically as a lot of other writers. I'd certainly teach her at length in a general 18th c. lit class.