Victorian Obsessions

Catalog description

The Victorians were obsessed with a whole lot of things. Understandably, since they were living in a world of intense change when long-held beliefs were being questioned and sometimes crushed. In this course, we will explore how the Victorians challenged gender roles, authorized female desire as much as they vilified it, dealt with the empire on which the sun had not yet set, reeled from the mind-boggling theory of evolution, grappled with urbanization and the widening gap between the classes, and journeyed into altered states of consciousness. Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major. Prerequisites & Notes First-year students require permission of the instructor.