This course will engage stories of romance from different times and places around the world. While certainly not exhaustive in scope, we will read medieval, British, American, African, and Russian texts in an effort to draw correspondences and contrasts between literary traditions. We will also engage the theme of romance from the perspective of gender, reading both male and female authors and striving to articulate the problems of attraction, love, obsession, betrayal, infidelity, lust, and as many other tropes of the romantic genre as we can find. The course texts are all written in narrative prose, but the styles will vary from what we recognize as the modern novel to forms of the novella and stories with oral dimensions as well. The reading load will be constant and monitored with consistent quizzes, in addition to a midterm and final exam. This course also carries a "W" requirement, which means students are expected to produce 10-12 pages of writing with mandatory revision. This requirement will be met by (three) short topic papers.

Required Texts:

1) Tristan and Isolde (Bedier and Belloc)
2) Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
3) The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
4) The Wedding of Zein (Tayeb Salih)
5) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)