CHL 429B The Girl Reader, 1868-1908
The title of this course is a direct and deliberate allusion to Kate Flint's The Woman Reader, 1837-1914, a book she describes as an "examin[ation] of the topos of the woman reader, and its functioning in the cultural debate between the accession of Queen Victoria and the First World War." In this course, we'll examine the topos of the girl reader, focusing on four classic versions of this figure: Jo March, Rose Campbell, Rebecca Rowena Randall (named for the two heroines of Scott's Ivanhoe), and Anne Shirley. The cultural debate we'll consider has to do with both gender-in that we will be thinking about the status of the girl reader at the height of first-wave feminism-and genre, as we consider what John Guillory calls the "institutional presentation" of the canonical in books for young girls written during the Golden Age of children's literature. We'll think about the valorization of Wordsworth in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, of Scott in Alcott's Eight Cousins, of Shakespeare and Dickens in Little Women, of Tennyson in Anne of Green Gables, for example. We'll compile reading lists of what the girls in these novels read; we'll look at scenes of participatory reading, and we'll think about these characters' "fictional reading" (the phrase is Flint's) versus our own actual reading.
Cross Listed Courses
ENGL 523