AUSTEN, ELIOT, JAMES

A study of the work of three writers most often credited with developing the narrative techniques of the modern Anglo-American novel, who also produced some of their culture’s most influential stories of female autonomy. What do the choices of young women in the nineteenth century— their ability to exercise freedoms, the forces that balk or frustrate those freedoms, even their choices to relinquish them— have to do with the ways that novels are shaped, with the technical devices and edicts (free indirect discourse, ‘show don’t tell,’ etc.) that become dominant in the novel’s form? One or two texts by each author read carefully, with attention to relevant critical discussions of recent decades.