English 252 - Fall, 2012

Victorian Literature

Topic: Electoral Politics and Its Others

Class Information

Instructor: Frederickson, Kathleen
CRN: 22569
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

Electoral Politics and Its Others (Britain, 1832-1918)

Optimism about the possibility that political representation might redress inequality and oppression loomed substantially larger in the nineteenth century than it does in the twenty first. This course will examine both the hope and the suspicion about the promise of parliamentary representation in British fiction and political theory between the period of the First Reform Act in 1832 and the Representation of the People Act of 1918. We will read novels about how elections in order to assess whether, how and why the state remained a site of hope against the ills of capitalism, colonialism, and sexism and to examine the changing definitions of citizenship and “the political” during this period. The historical focus for the class will be animated around the agitation around the three Victorian Reform Acts, the movement for Irish Home Rule, and the campaign for Women’s suffrage. We will undertake this reading alongside an examination of anarchist novels that refuse the idea of the state as the proper site of politics. In order to undertake this analysis we will read fiction by Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Colmore along with non-fiction by Lauren Berlant, Catherine Gallagher, Antonio Gramsci, Elaine Hadley, Catherine Hall, Peter Kropotkin,T. H. Marshall, Karl Marx, Iris Marion Young, and others.

Texts

Phineas Finn, Anthony Trollope
Felix Holt, George Eliot
Suffragette Sally, Gertrude Colmore
Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli
Princess Casamassima, Henry James