Emplotting (Un)Happiness: The British Novel in the Eighteenth Century
This seminar explores one of the most important subjects of the British novel in the 18th century, the question of individual, familial, communal and societal happiness. It addresses the significance of different philosophical, political and economic conceptions of happiness, the ways in which they act as hermeneutic frames and genre-shaping forces and asks how these conceptions of happiness are transformed, reflected, problematized and challenged in realist, utopian, sentimental, comic and feminist novels and philosophical romance / parable. We will explore happiness as a narrative structure that is characterized by specific forms of emplotment, temporalities and narrative affective conversions. Furthermore, seminar discussions will examine in how far the selected novels represent happiness and unhappiness as opposites or (as suggested by Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness) as inextricably connected concepts and modes of being.
The seminar focuses on the following texts:
Daniel Defoe: The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Daniel Defoe: Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Samuel Johnson: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)
Sarah Scott: A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762)
Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771)
Mary Wollstonecraft: Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798)
All critical literature will be provided on Moodle at the beginning of the term. |
