Great Writers: Special Topics in Gender, Authorship and History

This interdisciplinary course will focus on novels, plays and life writing by canonical authors such as Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf or newly canonical writers like Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. The course provides the opportunity to delve deeply into the life, works and sociohistorical contexts of a writer deemed 'great', as well as the opportunity to interrogate the construction of the concept of a 'great writer' itself. Each text will provide a starting point from which we will explore the representation of broad themes of historical and literary significance relating to the texts' historical and literary contexts. The course will examine the ways in which knowledge of the periods in which authors wrote enriches our understanding of their work and how texts in turn participate in certain crucial debates and developments of the period in which they are published or produced. The course will engage with questions of gender, sexuality, authorship and reception in understanding these texts' contemporaneous impact, production and reception over time.