Victorian Literature: Writing in a Time of Globalization and Crisis

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In this course, we will read Victorian novels, criticism, plays, and science as part of a period of globalization and crisis, marked by the unprecedented expansion of British imperial influence. How could this new world be represented meaningfully in language? What new accounts of personhood, sexuality, ethnicity, ecology, and art would it require? Over the course of the semester, we will unfold a conversation between Victorian writers around these questions, and we will consider what kinds of dialogues we might have with them, what unanswered questions from the nineteenth century we can return to in our own moment of globalization and crisis.