Studies in Victorian Literature: Reading Feeling

Catalog description

From rich paradigms of sympathy and sentiment adapted from the eighteenth century to newer theories of unconsciousness and crowd psychology, Victorian literature reflects shifting conceptions of feeling. This course examines how psychological claims ground the forms and experiences of reading in the Victorian period, as well as the recent theoretical turn to affect, which emerged in particular rejoinder to critical trends in Victorian studies. What evidence is there that emotions are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? How does the work of feeling register in literary form? Readings will include novels (Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Schreiner); narrative poems (Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Meredith); contemporary prose; and theoretical engagements with affect (Armstrong, Felski, Deleuze, Sedgwick, Ngai, Berlant, recent debates in Critical Inquiry).