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 literature of the 1800s. Christine McBride, Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, will give short lectures providing background and then lead the discussions. 2009-2010 season.
Woodstock Library
Second Sundays, October, December, February and April, 2–4 p.m.
The Discussions
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley · October 11, 2009
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert · December 13, 2009 · Register online for waiting list
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens · February 14, 2010 · Register online starting 12/13/09
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James · April 11, 2010 · Register online starting 2/14/2010
Registration is required for each session; register online, in the library or call 503.988.5399.
A limited supply of these books will be available at the preceding book discussions. Pick up a "bring-em-back" copy of the book, that you do not have to check out, at Woodstock Library after registering. Return the book at the discussion.
Meet your professor
Christine McBride, is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, where she specializes in 19th and early 20th century British and American fiction. She has published work on Henry James and narrative theory, and is currently at work revising her book manuscript, entitled The Problem with Possession in Henry James. Christine has taught at Stanford University, in the MA Program at Notre Dame de Namur University, and at the Dickens Universe hosted by the University of California at Santa Cruz.
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.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
With the possible exception of only Jane Austen, Charles Dickens is often considered the most quintessentially English of all great novelists. This 1860–61 novel, one of his best loved, amply displays why. A quintessential Bildungsroman, or novel of development, Great Expectations tells the story of how the young orphan Philip Pirrip (commonly known as "Pip") comes into enough money from a mysterious source so that he can leave his seaside village in pursuit of more fortune and of love (in the form of the cold and fascinating Estella) in London. In its conscious echoes of Frankenstein, Dickens's novel returns us not only to questions of parentage and origins but also to matters of ethical responsibility, all the while introducing us to one of the more memorable coteries of characters (here including the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the alarmingly Rhadamanthine lawyer Jaggers, the escaped convict Abel Magwitch, and the vengeful recluse Miss Havisham) for which its author was, and remains, so famous.
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 Jay Dickson and Christine McBride, Reed College.
More classic 1800s novels - Suggested Readings
Further reading about 1800s literature:
- Schor, Esther H. (ed.)
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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."
- Lawrence, D. H.
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(1923)“Lawrence asserted that 'the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.' In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings by such authors as Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Whitman, Lawrence himself has created a classic work. Studies in Classic American Literature is valuable not only for the light it sheds on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American consciousness, telling 'the truth of the day,' but also as a prime example of Lawrence's learning, passion and integrity of judgment.”
- Morrison, Toni
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(1992)"Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers authors such as Willa Cather, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Hemingway."
- 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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(1980?)”For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses.”
- Thompson, F.M.L.
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(2009)
About previous year's titles: Moby Dick
- Philbrick, Nathaniel
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(2000)"The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the Titanic disaster was in the twentieth. Nathaniel Philbrick now restores this epic story — which inspired the climactic scene in Herman Melville's Moby Dick — to its rightful place in American history. In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale."
- Hayes, Kevin J.
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(2007)"This introduction to Moby Dick offers readings of Melville's masterpiece, but it also sets out the key themes, contexts, and critical reception of his entire oeuvre. It covers Melville's life and the historical and cultural contexts. Melville's individual works each receive full attention, including Typee, Moby Dick, Billy Budd and the short stories. Kevin J. Hayes provides comprehensive information about Melville's life and works in an accessible and engaging book that will be essential for students beginning to read this important author."
- Naslund, Sena Jeter
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(1999)"The acclaimed author of Sherlock in Love presents another masterpiece of historical fiction, this one inspired by Moby Dick. This story is about a girl's adventures on a whaling ship, her marriage to Captain Ahab and her writing partnership with his first mate."
- Brodhead, Richard
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(1986)
- Rogin, Michael Paul
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(1983)”In this major reconsideration of Herman Melville's life and work, Michael Rogin shows that Melville's novels are connected both to the important issues of his time and to the exploits of his patrician and politically prominent family.”
Made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities Fund of The Library Foundation.
