EL 58A-Early American Women's Fiction

Tuesday 11:13:50
Seminar Room, TB 480
Anderson Hall
Professor Nan Goodman
nan.goodman@colorado.edu
Boazii University
Office Hours, by appointment (TB 460)
Spring 2014

Required Texts:
Primary
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1791/4), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/171
Hannah Foster, The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton (1797),
digital.library.upenn.edu/.../foster/coquette/coquette.html
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1842),
https://archive.org/details/hopeleslieorearl01sedg
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), installments together with historical
articles at http://nationalera.wordpress.com/
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861);
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899); http://www.gutenberg.org/files/160/160-h/160h.htm
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/284
Willa Cather, The Professors House (1925);
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200831h.html
Secondary:
See below by week
Requirements:
I expect all students to come to class having read the assigned readings and prepared to
talk critically about them (20%). I will allow everyone to miss one class with impunity.
If you have more than one absence, it will be reflected in your grade. Each student will

be required to give a 15-20 minute presentation (20%) and write a 15-20 page paper
(60%).
February
18

Introduction; Ivy Schweitzer, My Body / Not to Either State

Inclined: Early American Women Challenge Feminist Criticism, Early
American Literature, 44.2, 405-410.

25

Rowson, Charlotte Temple; NY Times article on Charlotte Temples

tombstone at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/nyregion/13trinity.html?_r=0;
Pictures of Charlotte Temple: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her
Readers at http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc97934/m1/1/;

March
4

Foster, The Coquette; Immanuel Kant, What is

Enlightenment? (1784); Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment?
(1984)

11

Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Judith Fetterley, My

Sister! My Sister!: The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,
American Literature, 70.3, 491-516

18

Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Jean Fagan

Yellin, Harriet Ann Jacobs (c. 1813-1897), Legacy 5.2, 55-61

25

Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

April
1

Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin; Lora Romero, Bio-Political Resistance in

Domestic Ideology and Uncle Toms Cabin, American Literary History
1.4, 715-734;

Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin

15

Chopin, The Awakening

22

SPRING BREAK

28

Wharton, The House of Mirth; Elaine Showalter, The Death of the Lady
(Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth, Representations 9, Special Issue:
American Culture Between the Civil War and World War I (Winter, 1985),

133-149; Deborah G. Lambert, The House of Mirth, Readers Respond,

Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 4.1
May
6

Wharton, The House of Mirth

13

Cather, The Professors House; Chalres Johanningsmeier, Determining

How Readers Responded to Cathers Fiction: The Cultural Work of The
Professors House in Colliers Weekly, 20.1;

20

Cather, The Professors House (articles TBD)