Wilde Times: Late Victorian Literature and Aesthetics

Catalog description

This class will focus on the literature of the 1890s in Britain, a time known as the fin de sicle (end of the century), examining the significant cultural, political and social debates of this period. We will be concerned in particular with the rhetoric of monstrosity and degeneration, with decadence, criminality, moral and physical disease, and with the growing fascination with the supernatural, the psychological, the sexual, and the deviant. The course will incorporate fiction, visual art and poetry, and may include texts from Christina Rossetti, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Field, H. G. Wells, and of course, Oscar Wilde.