English 252 - Winter, 2011

Victorian Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Frederickson, Kathleen
CRN: 43940
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: 308 Voorhies

Description

Labor and the Victorians
By reading fiction, parliamentary records, and political theory, this course will undertake an examination of Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics, practices, and ideologies around labor. What kinds of activities and conditions constitute and do not constitute "labor"? How do industrialization and the rise of "the professions" impact what gets defined as labor? In what ways does a discourse of labor permeate the understanding housework, childcare, and prostitution? How are discourses about labor implicated in Britain's imperial expansion? Does the theorization of the division of labor change over the course of the century? We will read fiction from a number of genres--the industrial novels of the 1840s, the imperial adventure story, and New Woman novels at the end of the century alongside debates by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim. Contemporary scholarship in Victorian Studies, feminism, Marxism, and (post-)colonial scholarship (the categories are obviously not mutually elusive) will help us think through these questions.

Grading

Class attendance and participation (including weekly discussion question posted online)
Short midterm paper
Final paper

Texts

Carpenter, Towards Democracy
Conrad, Nostromo
Dickens, Great Expectations
Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society
Gaskell, Mary Barton
Gissing, The Odd Women
Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic
Marx, Capital Vol 3
Moore, Esther Waters