This course will read a series of novels about characters who leave their childhood homes to pursue educational or economic opportunities (or simply to get away). What, we will ask, are some of the various forms this basic story can take? What different techniques do authors employ to tell it, and what issues does it raise? We will be particularly interested in the ways education and geographical and social mobility are seen to affect one’s sense of individual, familial, and communal — and even national and racial — identity. We will pair seminal nineteenth-century versions of this narrative of departure with twentieth- and twenty-first century novels that return to these questions, sometimes by reworking these earlier novels themselves.

Likely pairings include Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) with both James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007); George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1861) with Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009); and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) with Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928).