English 252 - Fall, 2016

Victorian Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Miller, Elizabeth
CRN: 53690
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later British
Focus: Genre, Interdiscipline, Method, Theory

Description

Victorian Media and the Victorian Novel

This course will draw on several approaches to media studies that have changed critical conceptions of the Victorian novel: seriality and serial reading; print culture, periodicals, and the history of the book; theories of media and technology; adaptation studies; and studies in photography, illustration, film, and visual culture. Reading prominent and lesser-known Victorian novels, we will consider the forms in which these novels have been mediated and re-mediated, and we will 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? How has the Victorian novel been adapted to other media? 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. Highlights of the class will include: reading _The Woman in White_ serially across the quarter, visiting Special Collections to examine original materials, and a movie night in week 6!

Grading

Final paper
Presentation
Attendance and Participation

Texts

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
New Grub Street, George Gissing
News from Nowhere, William Morris