This course explores the ways in which literature reflects, influences, creates, and reveals cultural beliefs about gender roles, identities, and sexuality by analyzing short stories, novels, poems, and plays from a diversity of eras and national traditions. Literary texts are studied in the light of major works of feminist and queer literary theories and histories of sexuality. The ways in which gender intersects with other cultural issues such as race, nationhood, globalization, and class is also addressed in the context of specific literary texts.
