Università Roma Tre

This course offers a survey of the English novel in the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th, from Daniel Defoe to Mary Shelley. Through the analysis of six novels written within one hundred years, we will explore the forms that this new genre takes, a genre destined to shape the European literary imagination in the following centuries. Within the course we will watch a selection of film adaptations of some of the novels considered and will investigate what happens to a story when it travels across media.

Testi:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) (suggested editions: Oxford World's Classics o Penguin Classics);
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742) (suggested editions: Oxford World's Classics o Penguin Classics);
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752) (suggested editions: Oxford World's Classics o Penguin Classics);
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) (suggested edition: Marsilio 2002, a cura di V.Papetti, con testo a fronte)
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814) (suggested editions: Oxford World's Classics o Penguin Classics);
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) (suggested editions: Oxford World's Classics o Penguin Classics);

Films to be announced.

Secondary readings:
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957), selected chapters.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel (1987), selected chapters.
Paolo Bertinetti, Il romanzo inglese (Laterza 2017), capitoli scelti.
Robert Mayer (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen (C.U.P. 2002), selected chapters.

History of English Literature (textbook):
P. Bertinetti (a cura di), Breve storia della letteratura inglese, Einaudi, 2004 (selected chapters).

This course provides an overview of English literature through the study of a variety
of texts by some of the most representative authors of the British canon from Restoration to Romanticism. The course will focus on topics, contexts and textual strategies with a view to underlining the cultural reflection on female characters with particular attention to binary oppositions such as male/female, interiority/exteriority, emotions/rationality, identity/otherness, freedom/slavery.

Aphra Behn, The Rover or the Banish’d Cavaliers (provided by the teacher);
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (selected cantos provided by the teacher)
Daniel Defoe, Lady Roxana (any unabridged edition)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (any unabridged edition)
Selection of Pre-romantic and Romantic poems: The Little Black Boy, The Little Boy Found, London by W. Blake; Perfect Woman and The Solitary Reaper by W. Wordsworth, She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron, La Belle Dame Sans Merci by J. Keats.

Literary History:
P. Bertinetti (a cura di), Storia della letteratura inglese, vol. I, chapters indicated by the teacher, Einaudi, 2000;
oppure
A. Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, chapters indicated by the teacher, Clarendon Press, 1994.