After preliminary lectures on the Neo-Classical era, this course surveys the major writers and theories of the Romantic period in their social and cultural contexts. One or two novels from those of Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes, and Wilde are included in the syllabus. This course is designed to provide an overview of children's literature. Books of fiction and of poetry, the traditional literature of the fairy tale, fable, myth and legend, and materials in the nonfiction areas of science, biography, and history will be evaluated. Standards for the selection of books will be considered.
Writing is an integral component.
Book reviews, learning logs, and an author report are developed in depth. Procedures for seeking publication are discussed. Recent decades have seen rapid growth in the variety of approaches and criteria of judgment used by literary critics. Such approaches as structuralism, feminism, psychoanalytic and myth criticism, cultural studies and reader response theory, among others, offer varied ways of interpreting texts. This course does not seek to advance the specific claims of any one of these schools, but to introduce students to their competing claims.