One of the unique pleasures in reading English literature—as in any major literature—is that afforded by the long text.  The satisfaction of completion, accompanied by the strange and vague discontentment of at last being done with a great, long, novel, is not the exclusive bastion of native speakers, and the 15-week Japanese semester presents a superb opportunity to take our time to get to know one of the great heroines of American literature: Isabel Archer, the beautiful, spirited American let loose on Europe to confront her destiny.  She is depicted with such extraordinary vividness, that the novel’s claim to be, in fact, a “portrait,” will seem perfectly justified.  This magnificent novel depicts many worlds in conflict: the old world and the new; Europe and the United States; men and women; family wealth and individual power: we will explore each of these conflicts, and more besides, while setting the novel in its mid-Nineteenth Century literary and historical contexts, “wandering between two worlds,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “One dead / The other powerless to be born.”

The learning aim of this course is first of all, to experience for yourself the pleasure of completing a longer novel in English, and consider how it differs from other experiences of reading literature.  Second, students will: develop their capacity for sustained reading and reflection on a major novel; sharpen their appreciation for complex, (“round” or “3-D”) characterization; extend their ability to read for plot and trace themes in long-form fiction; distinguish between national types and tendencies; situate late-Victorian fiction within the English and American literary traditions between Romanticism and Modernism; practice analytical interpretation and close-reading; learn to discern the “tone” of narrative and recognise character-inflection or “focalization”; develop their critical vocabulary and practice using persuasively in oral and written English.