Set books
The books you will need to purchase for this module are:
- David Lodge, Small World: An Academic
Romance (Penguin/ Vintage)
-
Jane Austen, Emma (any
edition)
-
Shakespeare, The Tempest (any edition,
e.g. in The Norton Shakespeare)
All the other set texts,
including the theory texts (mostly taken from the Modern Genre Theory
anthology, ed. David Duff) will be available as e-texts via the module website.
Preparation
The module is organised chronologically. A good way to prepare would
be to find about all you can about medieval romance and chivalry, and read the two texts we will study in Weeks 1 and 2: Marie de France’s Guigemar (a very short 'lay') and Chrétien de Troyes full-length romance Perceval, or The Story of the Grail, trans. Burton Raffel, available here as an e-book in QM Library.
You could also make a
start on one of the novels we will be studying in later weeks: Jane
Austen’s Emma and David Lodge’s Small World.
We will be study theory texts alongside literary texts. The theory text we will
study in Week 1 is Northrop Frye’s ‘The Mythos of Summer: Romance’, in my Modern Genre Theory anthology, available here as an e-book in QM Library. The introduction to the
anthology discusses some of the theoretical questions we'll be exploring and would be worth reading in advance.
