ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GNCS 249) Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Topic for 2023/24b: Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. This course introduces students to some of the most significant preoccupations of nineteenth-century British literature and culture. These preoccupations include the response to burgeoning industrialism, the place of art and culture in the modern world, the relationship between past and present, the role of women in the public and private spheres, and Britain’s status as a global empire. We acquaint ourselves with some of the most important writers from other periods (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, Dickens, Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, the Rossettis, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kipling) as well as some of its key genres (the novel, dramatic monologues, melodrama, social and political writings). Susan Zlotnick.

This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS