This course covers a wide range of periods as well as genres, while focusing on different renditions of the same issue: the precarious and sometimes conflicting interactions between private affections (love) and public order (marriage). In Marlowe’s tragedy Edward II, homosexual attachments threaten social norms as well as public duties. Aphra Behn’s novella The Fair Jilt displays passions as manipulative performance and scandalously leaves its guilty protagonist to enjoy the fruits of her murderous intrigues. John Donne’s Elegy IXX and Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress both claim on the other hand a fertile and libertine interaction between private and public, lust and power. Jane Austen’s courtship novels such as Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, embed their couples into closely observed social interactions and norms, across various generations. It is adherence to these norms that marks the ideal couple and, in turn, the couple itself benefits from its socially approved actions. Kipling’s short story “Kidnapped,” however, for all its ironic flippancy, displays the suffocating social powers of convention and prejudice in the case of a couple separated “for its own good” by its well-meaning friends. Eventually, Modernism questions all such norms. We will read a short story by Katherine Mansfield, “Marriage à la mode” and discuss T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to examine how gender relations themselves become unstable and former convictions crumble. The poems, short stories and Behn’s novella will be provided to participants in a reader via Stud-IP. Students are requested to have read Marlowe’s play at the beginning of term. Primary text knowledge will be tested; there will be a test on Marlowe’s play in the second week, and further tests in the course of term.
Texts:
Marlowe, Christopher. Edward II. Eds. Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsay. Mermaid Editions. London: Methuen, 2014.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Toni Tanner. London: Penguin, 2011.
