LIT206: Women’s Literature
This course examines the roles assigned to women in society as reflected in poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiographical writings by women. It reflects the views of women held in different countries and at different times in the recent past.
Most Recent Syllabus (Spring 2020)
I typically teach this course like our 100 level literature course by breaking it up by into modules by genre. Moving forward I will likely add some kind of themes.
Novels
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Passing by Nella Lawson
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Short Fiction
The Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Seven by Edwidge Danticat
A Scandal In Bohemia by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Shabbat by Marjane Satrapi
The Mortal Immortal by Mary Shelley
The Poetics of Sex by Jeanette Winterson
Poetry
Siren Song by Margaret Atwood
Rape Fantasies by Margaret Atwood
On Loving Two Equally by Aphra Behn
The Hymn To Demeter by Homer
Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain
Second Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Being Born A Woman and Distressed by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
Housewife by Anne Sexton
Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith
Non-Fiction
A Case Of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud
Autobiography by Margery Kempfe
Lillies of the Queen’s Garden by John Ruskin
Ain’t I A Woman by Sojourner Truth
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Professions For Women by Virginia Woolf
A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Religious Texts
The Book of Genesis
Sura 71
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Nowich