230620 Intersections of Class, Race and Gender (S) (SoSe 2007)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the traditional British literary canon was largely authored and authorised by white, heterosexual, middle-class Protestant males. Yet this canon and its inherent ideologies of class, sexuality, gender and race was repeatedly challenged by writers - often by ones that belonged to the "establishment" themselves - who strove to represent personal experiences and cultural encounters that were not supposed to happen at all. We are going to read literary and theoretical texts that confront the fact that identities/ideologies of race and class cut across sex- and gender-based categories of difference. The novels that we will focus on are E. M. Forster, Maurice (1913/4), D. H. Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley (1926/7) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975).