19th-Century Popular Fiction: Austen, Dickens, Stoker

Catalog description

Do you like detective stories, romances, historical fiction, or Gothic tales? Although some of these genres predate the 1800s, famous examples of each of them had major commercial success in the nineteenth century. In this course, we'll begin with some Sherlock Holmes stories to discuss what a genre is, and then as we encounter a quintessential marriage plot in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a story of love and death set during the French Revolution in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and the most famous vampire of all in Stoker's Dracula, we'll pick the concept of genre apart. Do texts ever fit neatly into a single genre? How are individual romances, historical novels, and Gothic stories constructed? How can genre show us what's unique about a given text, not just what's familiar? And why do different genres become popular at different historical moments? This course is for anyone interested in popular fiction who would like to explore its history. Fiction writers are especially encouraged to sign up; through critical and creative assignments, a major goal of the course is to explore the relevance of nineteenth-century novels and genre theory to your own reading and writing practices today.