ENGL170 PO - Legal Guardianship and the Novel

When Offered: Fall 2021.
Instructor(s): S. Raff
Credit: 1

This course examines the guardian as an evolving legal category, as a character populating that ‘form for orphans,’ the novel, and as a model for the literary persona of the novelist. Through readings in legal texts as well as novels by Richardson, Austen, Dickens, and James, we will ask how guardianship intersects with such concepts as ownership, representation, and especially authorship. We will explore the reader’s role as ward, and we will glance at guardianship’s bearing on histories of slavery, voting rights, and aesthetics, on contemporary problems such as mass incarceration and our failing stewardship of the earth, and on the novel genre’s many debts to drama.

Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1