What is more fascinating than stories about other people’s lives? Small wonder, then, that the novel of development, with its keen interest in a character’s life journey or process of maturation, continues to be one of the most popular genres in English literature. It is a genre highly attentive to the friction that arises between the individual and society and how these tensions affect the formation of the self. With this focus, the genre has shown itself as highly adaptable for exploring social norms or conflicts and the factors that may foster or impede an individual’s growth and integration into society. In this seminar, we will engage both with a beloved classic of the genre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (with its iconic vengeful spinster Miss Havisham), and its afterlife in Lloyd Jones’s international bestseller Mister Pip (2006), a novel set in war-torn Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) during the 1990s. We will also discuss to what extent the novel of development overlaps with or is to be distinguished from related genre categories, such as the coming-of-age novel or the novel of self-discovery. Two case studies serve as a basis for this expanded discussion: Emily Perkins’s Lioness (2023), which critically engages with the way neoliberalism has infiltrated our lives in the 21st century, and Malinda Lo’s Ash. The latter belongs to young adult fiction and is a queer rewriting of the Cinderella story. By the end of this seminar, students (a) will be familiar with key categories and scholarly debates in genre theory (b) will be able to combine a nuanced close reading of the literary text with a wide reading of its socio-cultural contexts (c) have honed skills to identify and critical engage with ideological implications of novels of development and their related genres Please obtain the following books: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Norton Critical Edition (ISBN-13: 978-0393960693) Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (ISBN-13: 978-0385341073) Emily Perkins, Lioness (ISBN-13: 978-1526660688) Malinda Lo, Ash, ISBN-13: 978-0340988374) Further reading material will be up-loaded on OLAT. |
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