English 252 - Fall, 2011

Victorian Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Miller, Elizabeth
CRN: 83754
Time: R 12:10-3:00
Location: 248 Voorhies

Description

This class, part of a three-class sequence on "periodizations," will focus broadly on the problem of periodization and 19-century British literature. Our goal is to understand the customary structures of literary periodization in this field and how these structures encourage some critical approaches while inhibiting others. We will consider aesthetic and critical challenges to the traditional division of 19th-c. British literature into Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist aesthetic categories, as well as aesthetic and critical challenges to the idea that Romanticism and Modernism marked epochal breaks from the past. We will also consider the utility of such divisions. Several class meetings will focus on the 19th-century Medieval revival, examining the multifarious political and aesthetic uses to which 19th-century writers put the invented category of the "Medieval." Other class meetings will focus on the literature of time travel, in the form of both historical novels and dystopian fantasy fiction.

Texts

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
Idylls of the King, Alfred Tennyson
A Dream of John Ball, William Morris
The Nature of Gothic, John Ruskin
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Secret Agent , Joseph Conrad
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster