Events and classes > Read the Classics > 1800s Novels
Read the Classics: 1800s Novels
Join the "Great Conversation" of the literary imagination by participating in a four-part reading, lecture and discussion series focused on classic novels of the 1800s. Lena Lencek, from Reed College, will give short lectures providing background and then will lead the discussions. 2010–2011 season.
Belmont Library
First Sundays in October, December, February and April, 2–4 p.m.
The Discussions
- Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley · October 3, 2010
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert · December 5, 2010 ·
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy · February 6, 2011
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James · April 3, 2011
Registration is required for each session; register online, in the library or call 503.988.5382.
A limited supply of these books will be available two months ahead of time for the first book discussion and at the preceding book discussions. Pick up a "bring-'em-back" copy of the book, which you do not have to check out, at Belmont Library after registering. Return the book at the discussion.
Meet your professor
Lena M. Lencek is Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, where she teaches Russian literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the Russian Silver Age, and takes part in the Classical humanities course. Her two central interests lie in, on the one hand, the intersection of fiction and social history, especially as represented in rituals, protocols, etiquette and fashion; and, on the other, evolving visions of the nature and objectives of verbal art. The author of over 12 books on cultural history, Lena also has extensive experience in radio and documentary television. Her researches have taken her all over the world, and she has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. Before coming to Reed, Lena taught at Harvard, Tufts and Columbia universities.
The Books
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
One of the cornerstone texts of Romantic fiction, Frankenstein was originally Mary Shelley's entry in the famous ghost-story competition she entered in with her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friends John Polidori and George Gordon (Lord Byron) at the latter's villa on Lake Geneva one rainy summer day in 1816. The 1818 novel, a nightmarish vision of procreation and science, has influenced literature, theatre, film and popular culture for generations, and has fittingly spawned innumerable adaptations. Deeply invested not only in questions of scientific capabilities and ethics but also in questions about gender and generation, Frankenstein has at its heart the multiple confusions between creator and artistic creation that continue to this day, when people still confuse the monster of Mary Shelley's tale with its titular progenitor. Victor von Frankenstein, the tormented Swiss scientist who breathes life into inanimate flesh, must wrestle not only with the dangers his creation poses to his family and to humanity in general, but also with his ethical responsibilities to his equally beleaguered "child." Come see why the original Frankenstein, with its complexly worked narrative structure, has haunted readers for generations and has been one of the most seminal texts not only in the genres of horror and science fiction, but of imaginative literature in general.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Immediately attacked by public prosecutors when it was serialized in 1856, Gustave Flaubert's most famous work, Madame Bovary, became an instant bestseller when it was published in book form the next year, and remains one of the most influential novels ever written. Its titular heroine, Emma Bovary, must contend with the colossal boredom of a respectable marriage to a dull physician in provincial France, and escapes into a world of romantic fiction and then into her own affairs of the heart. Emma's bourgeois daydreams, which precipitate her disastrous ending (and which gave rise to a whole new term, bovarysme), have raised questions for generations about the relations between romance and realism and between fiction and reality that will figure largely into our discussion of this best known of French 19th century novels.
Anna Karenina by Count Leo Tolstoy
First published in serialized form between 1873 and 1877, Leo Tolstoy's magisterial novel on monogamy and adultery, and their impact on the family and the life of society as a whole, was initially dismissed by critics as a "trifling romance of high life." More discriminating readers, however, instantly recognized it as a tour de force of psychological analysis and social commentary that anatomizes the most minute and subtle movements of the human heart and plummets the layers of consciousness. Set against the background of a Russia in transition from a patriarchal, agrarian order to cosmopolitan industrialization and capitalism, the novel chronicles the lives of several interrelated families as they grapple with the complex and disruptive reverberations of private decisions, made in private. Read against the background of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina foregrounds the question, so urgent in Tolstoy's and in our time, of woman's domestic and extra-domestic role in society, and what happens when she places her own needs and aspirations before those of her husband, children and social milieu.
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Arguably James' most successful novel with readers and critics, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) tells the story of Isabel Archer — a lively, lovely and curiously "independent" young American who comes to Europe with a spirited imagination and a determination to refuse the conventional narrative. Through Isabel, James revisits the 19th-century marriage plot, returning us to familiar questions (from our reading of Flaubert and Dickens) about money, manners and morals. Here, however, we find those questions complicated by a double-edged comparison between American "innocence" and European "experience." With its sympathetic yet acutely drawn picture of the snares that beset the American innocent abroad, James' version of the Bildungsroman raises penetrating questions about the darker implications of relational intimacy, the role of ethics in formation of the self, and the social limits set upon a woman's freedom. Stylistically lush and narratively compelling, The Portrait of a Lady invites us to consider the various ways in which — as James wrote in his 1908 preface to the novel — "the Isabel Archers [of the world] ... insist on mattering."
Original annotations of the discussion titles by Lena Lencek, Jay Dickson and Christine McBride, Reed College.
More classic 1800s novels — Suggested Readings
Further reading about 1800s literature:
- Schor, Esther H.
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(2003)"Well-known scholars review Mary Shelley's work in several contexts (literary history, aesthetic and literary culture, the legacies of her parents) and also analyze her most famous work — Frankenstein. The contributors also examine Shelley as a biographer, cultural critic and travel writer. The text is supplemented by a chronology, guide to further reading and select filmography."
- Steegmuller, Francis
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(1939, 1968)"An intensely readable and almost novelistic account of Flaubert's life, focusing in particular on how he came to write his most famous novel." New York Review Books, 2006
- Barnes, Julian
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(1990)"An intelligent and often funny fictional meditation on Flaubert's biography and the biographical enterprise in general."
- Heath, Stephen
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(1992)"Stephen Heath shows how this landmark text captures and articulates a fundamental experience of the post-romantic, commercial-industrial, emotional-democratic period. He explains how Madame Bovary represents Flaubert's intense personal engagement with the tragedy of bourgeois culture, while at the same time exemplyfying the author's commitment to the impersonality of Art and the transcendence of style. The novel is set in its literary and historical context and there is a guide to further reading."
- Pool, Daniel
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(1993)"If you have ever wondered what food, occupations, money, travel, education, or even underwear was like in nineteenth-century England, here are some answers. Pool explains the peerage system, class distinctions, acceptable behavior, attire, popular recreation and mandatory performances, government and business operations, menus, and much more. A glossary, more than 100 pages long, follows the essay portion to answer any further questions about hulks, or withies. Certainly, fans of Dickens, Trollope, and Austen will be fascinated, and the many quotes should inspire readers to return to the classics."
- Douglas, Ann
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(1998)"This modern classic by one of our leading scholars seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together exerted a profound effect on the only areas open to their influence: the arts and literature. Women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition. Sentimental values that permeated popular literature continue to influence modern culture, preoccupied as it is with glamour, banal melodrama, and mindless consumption."
- Fiedler, Leslie A.
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(1960, 1997)"A retrospective article on Leslie Fielder in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to this work as 'one of the great, essential books on American imagination.' This groundbreaking critical tome, first published in 1960, explores both American literature and character from the Revolutionary War to the present. From this work, there emerges Fielder's once scandalous, now increasingly accepted, judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is obsessed with death."
- Houghton, Walter Edwards
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(1957)"The Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic 'period pieces,' critical and biographical works, and extensive studies of their age, but the Victorian mind itself remains blurred for us — a bundle of various and often paradoxical ideas and attitudes. Mr. Houghton explores these ideas and attitudes, studies their interrelationships, and traces their simultaneous existence to the general character of the age. His inquiry is the more important because it demonstrates that to look into the Victorian mind is to see some of the primary sources of the modern mind."
- Nabokov, Vladimir
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(1981)A collection of the great Russo-American writer's lectures on the classics of Russian literature, this volume — first published in 1981 — offers a muscular excursion through the high points of Russian 19th century narrative. Armed with flawless erudition and impeccable aesthetic taste, the Nabokov of the 1950s confronts the reader with the persona of a puckish, opinioned dinner guest who enchants the company with his wickedly brilliant witticisms and lyrical insights.
- Figes, Orlando
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(2003)This elegantly conceived cultural history offers a comprehensive overview of the millennium of Russian values, traditions, and discursive practices, woven into a compelling narrative ingeniously centered on Count Leo Tolsoy's War and Peace. The political, religious, and economic contexts, social structure, and critical civilizational shifts, are related to the artistic and intellectual life of the Russians, and go a long way to answering the question of what constitutes the enigma of this puzzling, tragic, people with the creative brilliance of a super nova.
- Billington, James H.
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(1966)A classic in Russian studies, this pioneering work by James H. Billington, the thirteenth librarian of the United States Congress and a preeminent "book man" in the hallowed sense of the word, is acclaimed as a "rich and readable introduction to the whole sweep of Russian cultural and intellectual history from Kievan times to the post-Khruschev era." (Library Journal)
- Wilson, A.N.
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(1988)
- Troyat, Henri
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(1967)
Read the Classics is cosponsored by Reed College and Multnomah County Library.
