Celebrated by Ben Jonson in his poem “To Penshurst” as a symbol of humane order and true community, the English country house became a favourite setting and theme in fiction from the 18th century onwards. The rise of the novel with its emphasis on localised setting and its reflection of readers’ growing interest in buildings and architecture put the country house into a place of importance in the narrative. The Gothic novel’s sensationalism and violence challenged the rational expectations of those novelists who found in the country house the ideal, if not the actuality, of social order. The plot device of the innocent protagonist who arrives, as an outsider, in a strange and imposing house and is confronted by an unfamiliar and threatening way of life is a literary tool we recognise from our reading of 19th-century fiction from Jane Austen, whose Mansfield Park is arguably the prototype of our modern texts, to Henry James.
Like Mansfield Park, E M Forster’s Howards End (1910) portrays a world of traditional values being infiltrated and undermined by modern types – unscrupulous, ambitious, cruel, selfish and false. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1946) the great house stands for “the atmosphere of a better age”, for which some of the characters feel nostalgia, but the novel also depicts the aristocratic Flyte family as profoundly flawed in their struggle with their Catholic faith. In Ian McEwan’s post-modern take on the genre, Atonement (2001), it is merely “new money” that allows the Tallises to aspire to gentry status and inhabit a fake mansion, and the novel skewers their snobbish pretensions as well as destabilising the reader’s expectations. This course discusses all these issues, using clips from screen adaptations where appropriate.
Learning outcomes
The learning outcomes for this course are implicit in the course description and, for those who wish to write papers, in the essay questions which follow it. Students are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject, and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course specifically are:
1. To demonstrate an informed response to the texts and some of the issues covered on the course;
2. To become familiar with some analytical, literary-critical approaches to reading these 20th-century novels;
3. To gain a greater understanding of the literary and cultural contexts of these specimens of country house fiction.
Classes
1. Introduction: the history of country house literature
2. Howards End
3. Howards End
4. Howards End
5. Brideshead Revisited
6. Brideshead Revisited
7. Brideshead Revisited
8. Atonement
9. Atonement
10. Atonement and Conclusion
