Literature and Social Change: Undisciplining Jane Austen

Course Description

In 2017, a group of Romanticism scholars formed “The Bigger 6 Collective” as a way “to challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism” and ground studies of the global 18th and 19th centuries in antiracist and decolonial pedagogies. Following their example, in 2020 a group of scholars asked Victorianists to “undiscipline” the field: they called out the field’s whiteness, its parochialism, and its lingering colonial influences, among other things. Mostly, though, they aimed to draw attention to the field’s “marked resistance to centering racial logic” and the whiteness that structures the field’s scholarly and social practices. Following the work of Black Studies scholar Christian Sharpe, and her claims that we need to “become undisciplined” in order to combat anti-Black logics and practices, scholars working in the long 18th and 19thcenturies are re-imagining their fields to make them more inclusive, anti-racist, and decolonial in both research and teaching.

This course follows the call of these two movements – “The Bigger 6” and “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” – through “undisciplining” Jane Austen and placing her work more firmly within the context of transatlantic slavery, global capitalism, and the growing British Empire. This entails placing Austen and her work within the more radical politics of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, from women’s rights and the abolition of slavery to the revolutionary impulse of the working classes and enslaved people. The result will be not only a more critical and nuanced portrait of a canonical author with lingering appeal but a more thorough exploration of the historical, political, and cultural context in which these texts were produced. This is as much a class on British slavery, empire, and radical politics as it is on Jane Austen and early 19th-century British literature. Given Austen’s canonicity and her place within the rise of the British/Western novel, we’ll examine what it means to bring out the whiteness of her novels and how that helps us see how the realist novel was grounded in a racializing and globalizing impulse.

This class will place Austen’s novels within a broader set of texts to help contextualize them and show their global connections. We will examine gothic fiction, realism, and the rise of the woman writer; the early women’s rights movement, the abolition movement, radical politics and revolutions, notions of sentiment and sensibility, the large reach of the British empire and global capitalism, class and social movement, and racialization. The semester will close with an examination of what appears to be a resurgence of interest in Regency-era dramas and the phenomenon of color-blind casting as seen in Shonda Rhime’s immensely popular Bridgerton series, and how this is replicated in other recent adaptations of Austen (such as in the recent version of Persuasion). Our texts will be carefully situated within recent Black Studies and Post/decolonial Studies scholarship, scholarship on undisciplining and “widening” earlier time periods and decentering their whiteness, and decolonial pedagogies.

Please note that given the nature of 19th-century novels, this class has a heavy reading load. Students who enroll are expected to be able to keep up with the reading.

Student Learning Outcomes

  • Become familiar with late 18th and early 19th century British literature and the fields of Romanticism and Victorian Studies, including recent scholarship from these fields
  • Become familiar with a particular theoretical framework, such as Black Studies and Post/decolonial Studies, especially in their application to older time periods
  • Apply theory to readings of a variety of literary texts
  • Place literary texts in their historical contexts
  • Perform close readings of literary texts and apply these to critical conversations
  • Develop advanced writing, oral, and research skills

Required Texts/Films/TV (tentative)

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

Jane Austen, Emma (1815)

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)

Jane Austen, “Sandition”(1817)

Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (1790)

Laura Sansay, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)

Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1804)

Anonymous, The Woman of Color (1808)

Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)

Diana Mulock Craik, The Half-Caste (1851)

Shonda Rhimes, Bridgerton, season one (2020)

Carrie Cracknell, Persuasion (2020)

Andrew Davies, Sandition (2019)

Possible selections from other primary texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Wedderburn, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Thomas Clarkson, William Cowper, John Steadman, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Maria Edgeworth, CLR James, and Eric Williams, among others.

Possible secondary sources by Cedric Robinson, Simon Gikandi, George Boulukos, Edward Said, Kathrine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Alexander Weheliye, Sarah Ahmed, Selected essays from Victorian Literature and Culture 49.1 Spring 2021, special issue on “Widening the Nineteenth Century” Selected essays from Victorian Studies 62.3 Spring 2020, special issue on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies”; Selected essays from the Spring 2022 special issue of Studies in Romanticism, “Race, Blackness, and Romanticism” edited by Patricia Matthew; Elaine Freedgood; Eugenia Zuroski, Patricia Matthew, Victoria Perry, Lisa Lowe, Jennifer Morgan, and other selected scholarly articles on Jane Austen, literary realism, and the rise of the novel

Possible Assignments and Requirements

  • Weekly reading responses (2 pages)
  • Counter-Narrative Research Assignment / Conference Paper (7-8 pages): for this assignment, students will analyze a non-white/western perspective in relationship to one of our more canonical novels. This can be in the form of a written text, a transcribed oral narrative, a painting, or any other “text” or cultural artifact. Students will write a short conference paper that analyzes the text and discusses how it helps supplement and undiscipline the main text of that week.
  • Contrapuntal Reading Exercise: students will take one reference to the world outside England that we find in one of our novels, research that context, and bring it to bear on a short analysis of the text (4-5 pages).
  • Longer research essay (15-20 pages) on a research topic of your choice that relates to the class
  • Attendance and participation