Women have been "in" literature from the inception of the idea called "literature," both as the subject of the literary work and as the producer of the literary object. This course is designed to survey a common female figure in American literature, the fallen woman or the lost lady: a woman who has, for various reasons, stepped outside the conventional space of femininity in her time. Beginning in the late 1870s, with Henry James' Daisy Miller, this course will trace out a trajectory of change with respect to a woman’s place in the social and political sphere across the first decades of the 20th century. At the very end of the class, we will make a quick dash to 1958, to see what one author of that era made of the 'lost lady.'

 Required Reading

        Cather, Willa, A Lost Lady (1923)
        Crane, Stephen, Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893;96)
        Capote, Truman, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
        Chopin, Kate, The Awakening (1899)
        Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie (1900)
        Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)
        James, Henry,  Daisy Miller (1878)
        Malkiel, Theresa, Diary of A ShirtWaist Striker (1910)
        Larson, Nella, Passing (1929)
        Stein, Gertrude, Three Lives (1909)
        Wharton, Edith, Age of Innocence (1920)

All titles will be available at Wild Iris Books, 802 W. University Ave.
375-7477. Supplemental readings, should there be any, will be provided by instructor.
Some of these may be online, and some may be handed out in class. None will be very long!

Reading journal, mid-term essay, final paper.

Overview Schedule:
Unit I  The "Age of Innocence"  (Aug. 25-Sept. 15)
Unit II The "Gilded Age" (Sept. 15-Oct. 15)
Unit III Modernity and Modernism  (Oct. 22-Nov. 26)
Unit IV …and Tiffany's (Dec. 3-10)