Spring 2018

The Victorian Novel

Listed in: English, as ENGL-346

Formerly listed as: ENGL-40

Faculty

Alicia J. Mireles Christoff (Section 01)

Description

This course offers students an immersion in nineteenth-century British fiction, from Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad.  Reading a selection of the long novels (both serious and comic, restrained and emotionally overwrought, domestic and imperial) that continue to shape our sense of what the novel is and does, we will ask how the Victorian novel’s imagination of things like love and sex, gender and politics, the relation between the aesthetic and the social, and race, ethnicity, and empire, remain with us still.  Engaging with a range of critical approaches to the novel and to novel reading, we will also consider the nineteenth century as the birthplace of theoretical approaches (such as Marxism and psychoanalysis) that continue to shape the ways we read, live, and think.  Writers may include:  Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad.

Limited to 35 students.  Spring semester.  Professor Christoff.

If Overenrolled: Preference given to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and to English majors.

Keywords

Attention to Issues of Class, Attention to Issues of Gender and Sexuality, Attention to Issues of Race, Attention to Writing

Offerings

2022-23: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2009, Spring 2018