Skip to main content
Department of English
Search
Log in
Navigation
About
Current Office Hours
Diversity Resources
English Library
Faculty Statement Archives
Internal Dept Resources
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
University Writing Program
Video Guides & Worksheets
Visit us on Facebook
Major/Minor in English
Advising
Creative Writing Application
Honors Program
Internships
Literary Magazines
Major Requirements Guide & FAQ
Minor Requirements
Study Abroad
Why Major in English?
MFA in Creative Writing
Admissions
Events, Prizes, and Resources
MFA Program Faculty
Newly Admitted Grad Students
Resources
Ph.D. in Literature
About
Admissions
Newly Admitted Grad Students
PhD Alumni Directory
Resources
Courses & Schedules
People
News & Events
Off the Syllabus Podcast
Recent News
Contests
Contest Winners
Previous Contest Winners
Newsletters
You are here
Home
»
Courses & Schedules
English 252 - Spring, 2011
Victorian Literature
Class Information
Instructor:
Miller, Elizabeth
CRN:
32579
Time:
W 3:10-6:00
Location:
248 Voorhies
Description
Victorian Media and the Victorian Novel
“In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.” (Oscar Wilde, _Fortnightly Review_, 1891).
Wilde was not alone in recognizing that the Victorians had experienced an information revolution, and critics today have renewed interest in the question of how literary exchange participated in this shifting media sphere. This course will draw on several approaches to Victorian media that have changed critical conceptions of the Victorian novel: studies in seriality and serial reading; cultural-materialist approaches to print, periodicals, and the history of the book; theories of mass culture and mass media; and studies in photography, illustration, and visual culture. Reading prominent and lesser-known Victorian novels, we will consider the forms and forums in which these novels were published, and ask a variety of questions about narrative, visual, cultural, and social formations. Did Victorian serials and periodicals impose particular reading practices? What was the relationship between photography and novelistic realism? How did the verbal and the visual interact in illustrated novels? To what extent were mass media and mass literature emblematic of democracy? At the end of the course, we will turn to the late-Victorian invention of film, and consider Sergei Eisenstein’s claim that early film’s narrative practice followed from Victorian novels.
Texts
Course Reader
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900
, Altick, Richard
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Carroll, Lewis
The Woman in White
, Collins, Wilkie
David Copperfield
, Dickens, Charles
New Grub Street
, Gissing, George
The Romance of a Shop
, Levy, Amy
News from Nowhere
, Morris, William