CSP 76 Early Feminisms: Anglo-American Women's Fiction Before 1930

British and American women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries composed novels that grappled explicitly and complexly with gender issues alongside problems of socioeconomic inequity and other components of social injustice. Yet for all their visionary daring, novels from Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Brontë's Jane Eyre to Wharton's The House of Mirth and Woolf's Orlando also reveal themselves to have substantial blind spots: they uphold traditional gender roles and expectations, maintain elitist class distinctions, exoticize colonial spaces, replicate religious stereotypes, and in other ways illustrate the complexities and contradictions of "first-wave" feminism in England and the United States. In this seminar, we will read novels by Austen, Brontë, Cather, Wharton, and Woolf alongside texts from feminist history and theory that will help us to identify what is excitingly revolutionary about these texts as well as to recognize moments when, from our contemporary perspective, they may seem to contradict their own ideals of social justice.