English 155B - Fall, 2013

19th Century British Novel

Class Information

Instructor: Page, Ryan
CRN: 53539
Time: MWF 10:00-10:50
Location: 229 Wellman

Description

 Literary art in the nineteenth century becomes dominated by the novel, which is amusing, since most social critics of the period would not even deign to call novels in any sense examples of literature as such. A study of the relationship of the novel to society during the epoch suggests the novel was predominately viewed as frivolous at best, illicit and dangerous at worse, on the culture at large. In fact, it was nothing of the kind: the nineteenth century novel is deeply serious, unparalleled in its desire to encompass the entire world within the confines of its narrative. The nineteenth century imagination was a novelistic imagination. Just one measure of the success of this project as that, even to twenty- first century folks, contemporary depictions of the Romantic and Victorian age very often look like leftover scenes from a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens story. Yet the nineteenth century novel was also an unparalleled model of mass entertainment, a commercial enterprise that bound an entire society—especially as literary rates rose in the second half of the century—together. For anyone majoring in English, understanding the paradigm of the nineteenth century novel is essential, for it affects the entire scope and direction of modern fiction, and ideologically speaking, the imaginative interstices of modernity itself. In this course, we will track the development of the novel in Britain during the century by examining five major, characteristic examples. We will consider how each of these works epitomizes the novel as mass entertainment and social critique, we will discuss the novel as a powerful cultural institution, and we will focus on how the success of the novel during the nineteenth century has shaped the art of storytelling down to our own age of graphic, filmic, and cyber-media.

Grading

2 short papers (750-1000 words) in the form of explications on a specific textual issue (30%)
1 long paper (2000 words) in the form of a fully developed argument (40%)
Course Final (10%)
Quizzes, Short Responses, Participation (20%)

Texts

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Adam Bede, George Eliot
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy