Science Fiction and the Victorian Novel

Catalog description

Science fiction ?reads? like a new phenomenon: as though the spaceships and sandworms of our favorite, fantastical brand of genre fiction could only be inspired by recent technological advances. This class will explore the prehistory of science fiction: we'll examine Victorian texts and 21st-century science fiction side-by-side, tracing how contemporary speculative fiction emerges from nineteenth-century realism. We'll organize the course by theme?racism and xenophobia, the Gothic, technological revolutions, alternate history?and study one Victorian and one contemporary novel per theme. We'll also be reminded that science fiction is a nineteenth-century invention, by discussing science fiction milestones, like Frankenstein and The Time Machine, that continue to exert influence today. You'll read pairings like Bront?nd Ishiguro; Gaskell and Atwood; Sheridan Le Fanu and Octavia Butler. (ENGL-PST)