Littérature 1

Littérature 1: Birth of the professional female author in 18th-century Britain

The rise of the novel genre in 18th-century Britain is chiefly associated with the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne. But the book market was one of the few ways in which middle-class women could make some money, sometimes even a living, and by the 1780s the majority of novels published each year in Britain were written by women rather than men – especially so-called sentimental and gothic novels. Women took on other genres as well, from children’s literature, to poetry, drama, and political essay writing. This course aims to explore late 18th-century writing by women and the material conditions which favoured its development, through a selection of extracts across literary genres (from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen via Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe) and the study of a complete novel, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). In both cases, particular attention will be paid to the different writing strategies employed by female authors (developing specifically female forms or boldly appropriating male ones) within a literary field in which the distribution of genre, subject matter and style was highly gendered.

The course seeks to familiarize students with a less canonical corpus of 18th-century writers and works while inviting them to question the historical and formal specificities of writing by women. It aims to train them as well to the study texts of various lengths for the purposes of commentary and essay writing.

Évaluation session 1

- Régime standard : 2 écrits de 2h chacun, chaque épreuve vaut 50% de la moyenne.

- Régime dérogatoire : 1 écrit de 3 heures.

Évaluation session 2 : 1 écrit de 3 heures.

Dans le cadre de cet EC, l’usage de l’IA pour aider à la réalisation des travaux de contrôle continu soumis à évaluation est interdit. Vous n’avez pas le droit de faire appel à une IA générative à des fins de documentation, recherche d’idées, construction, rédaction ou édition (hors usages de recherche web augmentée, de correction orthographique et syntaxique).

Anglais C1

Développer une argumentation avec esprit critique.

Communiquer par oral et par écrit, de façon claire et non-ambiguë, dans au moins une langue étrangère.

Analyser un document en le replaçant dans son contexte historique, géographique et culturel.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), any edition.

Further reading:

Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992.

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.

Eleanor Rose Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Selection of texts handed out at the beginning of term.