Issues of Gender in the Eighteenth-Century: A Syllabi Exchange
The Aphra Behn Society at ASECS, 1998

English 641: Life Writing in 18th-Century Britain

Prof. Ellen Gardiner
University of Mississippi

Course Description: Among other things, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of literary authorship as a profession and the consolidation of the modern concept of individuality. In light of such developments, this course examines "life-studies," or "biographies," as their authors' responses to their culture, as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers.

We will attempt as well to expand current theories of biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the higher literary order is, at best, marginal. This course assumes that all "life studies" participate in the construction of subjectivity; hence, we will read fictional as well as historical biographies, canonical as well as non-canonical studies. Over the course of the semester we will address the following questions with regard to the issues of gender, genre and the material conditions of professional authorship during this period: What role does Law play in creating eighteenth-century authors? How did authors resist, or subvert, through biographical writing, institutional attempts to define and control their identity? How does the paradigm of writing as a profession and an art influence the development of this particular genre? What is the impact of gender on eighteenth-century biographies? The course will be arranged in the following four clusters, all of which will combine texts from eighteenth-century British literature, and theoretical texts that promote reflection on generic and cultural issues: The Genre of Life Studies, Authorship and Life Studies, Fiction and Life Studies, and Identity and Life Studies. a) The first questions we will address are: How did the eighteenth-century define or view biography or life writing? How did authors resist, or subvert, through biographical writing, institutional attempts to define and control their identity? How do we define "biography" or "life writing" now? To do so, we will first read Johnson's Life of Savage and then move to a discussion of the most recent, book-length, theoretical treatment of biography, William Epstein's Recognizing Biography (1987). When we examine the relationship between Authorship and Life Studies, we will attempt to complicate previous interpretations of the canonical Boswell's Life of Johnson by reading it, first and foremost, as a response to Hester Thrale Piozzi's Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson. Our examination, in this section, of the interrelatedness of law and gender in identity formation will be relevant to our examination of the ways in which writers use fiction to shape cultural attitudes about subjectivity. In looking at the relationship between Fiction and Life Studies, we will continue to explore the impact of the law and gender on biography and address the question of how the paradigm of writing as a profession and an art influence the development of "literary" biographies such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

Finally in terms of the impact of 18th-century conceptions of identity and gender on the development of the genre of Life Studies, we will read Colley Cibber's An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber and his daughter Charlotte Charke's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. Literary critics have assessed, for example, both Cibber's and Charke's text to be failures, "literarily." Nonetheless, as responses to the normative pressures of the eighteenth-century literary-critical elite, their life studies are important documents in the history of the individual in culture.

Required Texts

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko.
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Charke, Charlotte. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke.
Cibber, Colley. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, comedian and late Patentee of the Theatre-Royal. 2nd edition. London: Watts. 1740.
Epstein, William. Recognizing Biography. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?"
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Johnson, Samuel. The Life of Savage.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1990.
Nussbaum, Felicity. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
Piozzi, Hester Thrale. Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy
Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jasczi, eds. The Construction of Authorship

Schedule

The Genre of Life Studies:
Week 1: Introduction to the course and its aims
Week 2: Johnson's, Life of Savage
Week 3: Epstein, Recognizing Biography

Authorship and Life Studies:
Week 4: Boswell, Life of Johnson
Week 5: Foucault, "What is an Author?" and Woodmansee and Jaszci, eds., The Construction of Authorship
Week 6: Piozzi, Anecdotes

Fiction and Life Studies
Week 7: Laquer, Making Sex
Week 8: Behn, Oroonoko
Week 9: Gallagher, Nobody's Story
Week 10: Sterne: Tristram Shandy

Identity and Life Studies
Week 11: Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject
Week 12: Cibber, An Apology
Week 13: Butler, Gender Trouble
Week 14: Charke, A Narrative
Week 15: Conclusion