CHL 429B The Girl Reader, 1868-1908
Examines 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. Considers cultural debates with 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. Considers 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. Addresses characters' "fictional reading" (the phrase is Flint's) versus our own actual reading.
Prerequisite
None