Gender and the Advice Genre

This course will examine the gendering of the advice genre from it’s proliferation in the early modern period until present day with focus on the advice genre itself as well as literary texts that advise their readers.  We will begin our course by examining “mirrors for princes,” a specific genre of advice which fashioned future rulers, along with the gendered advice given to men and women of the nobility with the goal of creating courtiers and wives.  We will then move into the eighteenth century to analyze the continued focus on gendered education and new modes of offering advice in periodicals.  In the texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will examine “how to guides” and shifting genre conventions which begin to include humor as a primary mode of offering both gendered and non-gendered advice to readers.  Some questions we will explore are: What are the origins of the advice genre?  How does the advice genre gender its writer as well as its reader?  Who are the readers of advice manuals or columns, and how does the genre adapt to changes in readership and publication?  What are the rhetorical strategies used to offer advice, how do these strategies change over time, and why?  How do performances of femininity and masculinity change over time and across national traditions along with the evolution of the advice genre? How does the advice genre influence and cement notions of gendered behavior and identity?

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP)