Two Mondays: July 24 and 31, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET Online
Lecture and Discussion. This live class will be recorded and available for later viewing.
Elizabeth Gaskell was a popular Victorian novelist, most famous for her social criticism of the costs of industrialism in novels such as Mary Barton and North and South, her unfinished masterpiece Wives and Daughters, and her biography of her friend, Charlotte Brontë. She wrote a series of short stories for publication in Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words. Later gathered together, they became the novel, Cranford, a fictionalized portrait of the small-town social world in which Gaskell grew up. Loosely and episodically organized, the book lacks a tight plot but has consistently been critically praised as “charming” in its portrayal of the women who dominate the town’s social structure. The novel explores and questions gender, class, and social change in subtle but interesting ways. Please join us for discussion of this short novel to discover its charm for yourself.
Week 1: Cranford, chapters 1-8
Week 2: Cranford, chapters 9-16; supplemental materials: “The Last Generation in England” and “The Cage at Cranford” (Appendices I and II in the Oxford edition).
Two Mondays: July 24 and 31, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET Online
Required Book:
Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell Oxford University Press (9780199558308)
Kara Keeling is a Professor of English and Director of the Childhood Studies Program at Christopher Newport University, where she has taught courses on children’s and YA literature, and 19th-century British poetry and novels for the past thirty years. She has a Ph.D. in Victorian British literature. She resides in Virginia with her English professor husband and two cats who enjoy sleeping on their books and papers.
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
