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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Victorian literature in tandem with a review of British imperial history in the Nineteenth century.
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to give students the long view of critical developments in Victorian literary scholarship that focuses on gender as well as an opportunity to develop original research in current conversations on the topic. During the first four weeks of the semester we will review developments in Victorianist scholarship on gender since the recovery work of Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in the early eighties. During these first weeks we will focus intensively on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Alfred Lord Tennyson's poetry. The remainder of the course will be devoted to contextualizing Victorian literature within current Victorianist scholarship on the gentlemanly ideal of character (addressed by scholars such as Lauren Goodlad, Pam Morris, and Stefan Collini), issues of marriage and contract (addressed by scholars such as Sharon Marcus, Rachel Ablow, and Mary Jean Corbett), and gender and political economy (addressed by Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher). Victorian texts covered in the course will include Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women, and George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. Depending on student interest (please e-mail me), this course can also offer coverage of Irish literature from the Victorian era, including Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn, Charles Lever's Harry Lorequer, and Emily Lawless's Grania.
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3.00 Credits
How Enlightenment writers, through the literary devices of fantasy and character, explored notions of "selfhood".
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3.00 Credits
This course will be a study of the Novel as a genre. Centering on literature of the 18th and 19th century, it will also take us further afield, beginning with two ancient novels, and taking in en route the first volume of the Chinese Qing dynasty novel (c. 1750) by Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber). The complexities involved in conceiving of human beings as definable by "objective" or "subjective: attributes and actions will be closely examined, as well as various developments of narrative techniques to create or express "inwardness" (including the personality of a narrator)-- or the repudiation of any such "inwardness". In pursuit of the concept of "character" we shall look at passages of history, including Suetonius' "Life of Nero" in The Twelve Caesars, and excerpts from Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The creation of type-character will be explored, beginning with Theophrastus' Characters. The magpie Novel notoriously adopts and adapts themes and techniques adopted from other genres, so we shall also look at a couple of plays (one by Euripides, one by Shakespeare), and at some satiric and lyric poems (Sappho, Horace, Petrarch). Novels, though often dismissed as mere reflecting mirrors of manners, have also shaped the way we look at the world, offering new ideas of what we call "consciousness" and proposing new views of what we call "human rights". Some of the antagonism raised by the Novel through various eras may arise from suspicion that any individual novel contains some seeds of enlightenment (religious and/or secular), and delivers concealed messages about change. In the 18th century awareness of this possibility apparently arouses both enthusiasm for novels and condemnation of them-- and of new genres like "Gothic fiction." Major novels: Petronius, Satyricon; Heliodorus, Aithiopika (Ethiopian History);Cervantes, Persiles and Sigismunda; Anon.[ comte de Guilleragues attrib.], Les Lettres Portugaises ( Portuguese Letters); Cao, The Story of the Stone (Vol. I); Fielding, Tom Jones; Richardson, Clarissa; Lennox, The Female Quixote; Austen, Mansfield Park; Balzac, Le Père Goriot; Dickens, David Copperfield; James, The Wings of the Dove. Theorists: Aristotle, Locke, Freud, Bloom. Critics of Shakespeare reflecting notions of "character" from era to era: Thomas Rymer, Samuel Johnson, A.C. Bradley, E.E. Stoll. Contemporary critics of prose fiction: Deidre Lynch, Peter Brooks, Michael McKeon, Lisa Zunshine, Maria DiBattista.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of the confrontations and nexi of the British Romantic movement with other countries, continents, and cultures.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of selected poetry of Dryden, Pope, Anne Finch, Gray, Collins, Anna Barbauld, Smart, Cowper, and Blake, with complementary attention to theories of poetry, from both the 18th century and the last few decades of our own period. Several short papers, one or two reports, and a final seminar paper.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore the Victorian concern with the ways literature seeks to act on its readers as well as the ways it portrays agency, the capacity for action, transformation, and reform. We will focus in particular on the period between the two great Reform Bills, of 1832 and 1867, during which recurrent debates about reform shaped conceptions of gender, class, and nation. The course will cover the range of major authors and genres, including works by Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson. Students will complete a series of assignments (bibliography, prospectus, etc.) leading up to completion of a substantial research essay.
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3.00 Credits
"Domestic" and "foreign" British victorian literature.
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3.00 Credits
The course aims at reconstructing and debating how, since the late eighteenth century, European literature has not just passively reflected the process of nation building, but rather has actively developed patterns of identification present in the idea of a nation. Novels from Fielding to Dickens in Great Britain, Manzoni and Nievo in Italy, various poems by Foscolo, Heine and Wordsworth will be analyzed in the light of Edward Said's, Homi Bhabha's and Benedict Anderson's works, and, more in general, of all theoreticians who have elaborated instruments appropriate for understanding the nation itself as a fiction. Far from weakening the original meaning of nation, the literary term "fiction" in fact encompasses and comprehends the different elements that are present in the concept of a nation. The history of European literature in the so called "Age of revolution" (1789-1848) reveals how nationalism has to be understood within those large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which - as well as against which - it came into being. Literature in particular shows how the representation of social life is the first step for acknowledging a common purpose and a collective identity as bases of a modern nation.
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3.00 Credits
Nineteenth-Century Britain is at the center of a large historical transition from a traditional (feudal and agrarian) social order to a modern social order, marked by the rise of democratic politics and industrial, urban society. This course focuses on 19th-century novels that aimed to represent this transformation at the social level--novels that aimed to paint a large picture of British society. Therefore, although readers often appreciate novels for their detailed focus on individual lives, we will keep alert to how novels represent the complex social conditions within which such lives must be lived. Our thematic focus will allow us explore some of the largest controversies in scholarship of recent years. We will see how scholars have staked out several different, even antithetical ways of understanding how literary works reflect and inform social life in this period. Foucauldianism and New Historicism, for example, derive importantly from Marxism and emphasize how literary works serve the ideological agenda of liberal modernity and capitalism. In that view, the novel genre tends to celebrate individualism and to cultivate reformist rather than revolutionary thinking. But another set of scholarly arguments, deriving from several different political theories, has challenged the Marxian criticisms by seeking to develop more nuanced and sometimes redemptive interpretations of liberal culture and political modernity. This course will put students in a position to engage our primary texts and current scholarly debates in a strong, informed fashion. The central goal is the creation of an article-length term paper with strong prospects of eventual publication.
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