Advanced Topics in Literature I

Topic for Fall 2026: Jane Austen and Her World. In the class, we'll explore the work and the world of one of the greatest novelists who ever set pen to paper: Jane Austen. While many courses on Austen begin and end with her novels, we'll be taking an expanded approach — appreciating the novels as art, to be sure, but also using them as portals into her world. Students will learn about Austen's life, about the authors who influenced her, and about the culture and politics of her times. In the end, our goal is to see Austen at ground-level, making great art not as some isolated genius, but as a consummate woman of her times. That goal will also motivate our main project for the class, in the course of which students will work with each other and their teacher to publish a critical edition of a collection of poems by one of Austen’s overlooked contemporaries. This edition will be published under the Pixelia Publishing imprint as part of the Forgotten Contemporaries of Jane Austen series, and will contain notes and an introduction drawing connections between this poet and Austen herself. Students opting for the non-writing version of the course will complete fewer homework assignments and contribute in a smaller, though still meaningful, way to the critical-edition project.