26019 - English Women's Literature

Learning outcomes

The student possesses in-depth knowledge of English women's literature. He is able to use practical methodologies for the analysis and the interpretation of the literary text

Course contents

"A witch? Who is not?: Representations of the witch in women's writings from Elizabeth Gaskell to Caryl Churchill.

The course aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the literary representation of the witch within a selection of texts by English women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Moving from the witch hunts of the Middle Ages and from the 1487 publication of the Malleus Maleficarum which contributed to the establishment of the witch as the devil’s servant, the course will consider the first famous literary depictions of witches such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth or The Tempest. Based on the theoretical work of Silvia Federici, we will discuss the repression of witchcraft as a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women. We will focus on three different literary texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Lois the Witch (1859), set in Salem in the seventeenth century during the witch hunt, one of the first depictions of the witch as the isolated, hysterical other; the short novel Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, where witchcraft becomes a metaphor for female emancipation and revolt against the oppressive patriarchal order; and the 1976 play by the contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill, Vinegar Tom, which stages a seventeenth-century witchcraft trial as a way to explore gender and power relations and the unequal treatment of women in twentieth-century British society.

 

Readings/Bibliography

Primary Texts:

Elizabeth Gaskell, Lois the Witch, in Gothic Tales, Penguin, London 2000.

Sylvia Towsend Warner, Lolly Willowes or The Loving Huntsman, Penguin, London 2020.

Caryl Churchill, Vinegar Tom, in Plays: 1, Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury, London 2020.

Critical Readings:

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Penguin, London 2021. 

Deborah Wynne, "Hysteria Repeating Itself: Elizabeth Gaskell's Lois the Witch", in Women's Writing, vol. 12, 2005, issue 1, pp. 85-97.

Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, "Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes", in Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 49, n. 4 (winter 2003), pp. 449-471.

Mamata Sengupta, "Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom", in Theatre History Studies, vol. 40, 2021, pp. 141-156.

Teaching methods

Lectures and seminars. Students will be required to participate actively in class discussion.

Assessment methods

Final oral exam. The submission of an essay may be agreed with the lecturer.

Attendance and class partecipation will also be assessed as a component of the final overall mark.

Teaching tools

Literary and critical texts, power point presentations, web-based resources.

Office hours

See the website of Carlotta Farese