Victorians at the Movies

Catalog description

Why do the movies love the Victorians? Why does Dracula keep coming back to life on the silver screen? Why do we watch Lizzy Bennet saucily reject Mr. Darcy's proposal again and again, and keep coming back for more? From Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein to Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, there is no shortage of nineteenth-century inspiration for modern box-office hits. What might these cinematic reimaginings of now classic stories tell us about our own time? In this course, we will read nineteenth-century novels alongside both twentieth-century and very recent film adaptations and explore how these two forms of media have engaged concerns that trouble Victorian and contemporary audiences alike: love and sex, race and gender, and immigration and imperialism. We will hone our interpretive, close reading skills by examining how movies use cinematic tools to interpret literature and tell stories-and by creating short adaptations of our own.