This course is a reflection on gender in literature and to what degree gender is bound with sexual expression. How is gender represented in literature? How does gender relate to identity? How women have been depicted in literature (perhaps because of gender assumptions) and how have these portrayals transformed and opened up a need for a different kind of women’s writing? This class is concerned with cultural, political, sociological, and psychological explorations of gender. We will attempt to tackle these formidable topics through literature (drawing on various genres), criticism, and theory. Gender in literature – and the representation, performance, and restriction of gender -- can be one way to enter into critical discussion of normative and trangressive sexuality, and of course, the fluidity of these categories. We will be exploring issues that arise from social, psycho-sexual, and political complications of gender along the way. For instance, we will look at how social structures, in their policing of sexuality, have determined how gender is understood. There will be an assumption of the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. Among other things, we will examine bourgeois sexual conventions in turn-of-the-century Vienna, post-partum depression in a Victorian novel, and madness in a postcolonial novel. Theoretical writings and literary criticism will supplement our readings of literary works by William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, and others