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