Seminar: AM Anglistik Literatur II (Prose): Nuns! - Details

Seminar: AM Anglistik Literatur II (Prose): Nuns! - Details

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General information

Course name Seminar: AM Anglistik Literatur II (Prose): Nuns!
Semester WiSe 2025/26
Current number of participants 12
Home institute Englische Literatur und Kultur
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Next date Monday, 15.12.2025 08:15 - 09:45, Room: Seminarraum 2 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Participants BA 60/90 (wahlpflicht)
Pre-requisites erfolgreich bestandenes Basismodul Literaturwissenschaft (Anglistik oder Amerikanistik)
Learning organisation Rumer Godden, Margaret. Black Narcissus. Virago Modern Classics Paperback, 2013.
Townsend Warner, Sylvia. The Corner That Held Them. Penguin Modern Classics, 2021.
Mackenzie, Victoria. For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
Wood, Charlotte. Stone Yard Devotional. Sceptre, 2025.

Further recommended reading:
Stephen J. Davis's Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2018).
Clark, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Yale UP, 2021).
Wikipedia provides an good introductory look at Anglican (post-reformation) monasticism here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_religious_order
Performance record Studienleistung: Referat mit Handout, Tests zu den Primärtexten
schriftliche Hausarbeit (6000+ Worte)
Lehrsprache(n) Deutsch; Englisch
Studiengänge (für) BA Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60/90
Diese Lehrveranstaltung ist im Studienbegleitprogramm von gender*bildet (Zertifikat Gender Studies) anrechenbar. Nähere Informationen finden Sie unter diesem Link (https://www.rektorin.uni-halle.de/stabsstellen/vielfalt-chancengleichheit/gender_bildet/angebote_studierende/zertifikat/).
SWS 2 von 4
ECTS points 5

Module assignments

Comment/Description

This seminar explores the figure of the nun as a recurring and charged topos in English literature —from medieval type to postmodern feminist fiction. Beginning with Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (2024), an international bestseller by an Australian author, we consider the contemporary resonance of enclosed female religious life, to familiarise ourselves with the monasticism it describes from the point of view of an atheist woman joining a small benedictine convent in outback Victoria. The novel will provide our entry point into the long literary history of representations of women’s devotions, enclosures, communities, crises, and resistance.
From there, we turn to Geoffrey Chaucer’s "The Second Nun’s Tale" from his Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), where the hagiographic life of St. Cecilia reflects early English fascination with virgin martyrdom, piety, and female spiritual authority, while the nun relating this tale uses her narrative quietly to assert her authority.
We next move to two extracts which will help us to understand the two paradox clichés circulating about female monasticism following the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41) and the more quiet restoration of Anglican monasticism with the founding of the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross in 1845 (in connection to the Oxford Movement): the salacious nun vs. the ascetic nun. An extract from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952), a nonfiction novel about the Ursuline 17th-century possessions in France, will show how the historical and the ascribed hysterical cross over repeatedly, tapping into 18th century obsessions with pornographic nuns as well as 20th century obsessions with demonic exorcisms and possession (both still a strong topic for horror and pornography movies). In comparison, we will briefly encounter Victorian anti-monasticism in a short extract from Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre (1847), to discuss the opposite cliché of nuns exhibiting a selfishly antisocial renunciation of personal responsibility, marriage and motherhood.
With this, we can move to read Godden’s Black Narcissus (1939), a novel that transposes a reformed benedictine convent to a Himalayan setting, and which will show us a representation of culture clash, mysticism, repression, and the colonial Gothic within the imperial gaze; a text that is written both in the tradition of the former clichés and in an attempt to flesh out more complex questions of comparative religion, community life (and strain) and the role of women in the colonial administration.
We next turn to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them (1948), a Marxist chronicle novel that captures the rhythms of Medieval English convent life over decades, resisting both romanticisation and moral didacticism in favour of a temporally radical form.
Finally, we conclude with Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (2023), a postmodern, feminist reconstruction of the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. These two very contrasting Medieval mystics will echo originally Victorian questions of the place of female renunciation and suffering, authorship and voice, divine revelation and singular spirituality, and show how these issues still matter in contemporary English writing.
Across these texts, we will discuss: How does the trope of monasticism function in British history, culturally and in literature? How does the figure of the nun develop as a site of anxiety, projection, and ethical imagination across the centuries? How do narratives of enclosure represent questions of gender, authorship, power, and belief? What forms of novels have constrained such representations by recurrence to their own traditions?
To ensure active participation, there will be tests on primary text knowledge in the course of term. Please obtain the printed editions listed above to help citations and seminar discussion - as ever, reading physical books rather than e-texts is strongly recommended and ultimately in your own interest. Text extracts will be provided in Stud-IP for download. Our Chaucer reading will use the Harvard edition of the Canterbury Tales available online here:
https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/literary-works