Course Resources Archive

This module provides students with the opportunity to explore the diversity of women's writing from North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The module provides a mixture of lectures and seminars, and encourages student involvement and active engagement, through a variety of activities, such as discussion and informal group work.  Students encounter texts on the module which reflect and problematise issues of ethnicity/race, class, and region.  Issues such as pioneering, sexuality, resistance, creativity, and nature are explored, through a selection of works by North American women writers, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood.  We also consider the different generic strategies employed in fiction, poetry, drama, and film, in order to examine the politics of representation and the complexity of North American women’s experience.

i. Knowledge and Understanding
By the end of the module students should be able to demonstrate that they:
a) understand key concepts and issues relevant to women's writing, American studies, and a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, including feminist critique;
b) are familiar with: a wide range of generic and textual forms produced by North American women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries; historical and cultural perspectives; theoretical and critical concerns pertaining to women's writing and North American literature.

ii. Skills
will include:
gathering information from lectures, small group discussion; and film analysis.

The Library Catalogue contains full details of the current reading list for this module. Further details may also be found in the Module Guide.