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ENGL BC3907 Senior Seminar: The Brontës. 4 points.

Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

Prerequisites: Sign up through the "SR Seminar" section of myBarnard. Enrollment limited to senior Barnard English majors.

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. In this course, we will closely study the works of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Although the Brontës are famous for their secluded lives on the moors of Yorkshire, their novels brilliantly engage many of the most urgent cultural concerns of the Victorian era, including poverty and social alienation; colonialism and empire; psychology, desire, and repression; religious belief and spirituality; the role of art and the imagination; and, especially, the social, economic, and political condition of women in the nineteenth century. We’ll explore these topics and others through readings of the Brontës’ major novels (Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), as well as some of their less well-known works, including their poetry and their astonishing juvenile literary experiments. We’ll also consider the enduring influence of the Brontës' novels in film and literature; additional texts may thus include recent film adaptations of the novels, as well as works such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.