Victorian Poetry and Prose

Catalog description

This course examines the poetry and non-fiction prose of the Victorian period, which begins with the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832 and runs concurrently with the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901, a period that saw a general shift away from the Romantic emphasis on individualism and subjectivism to a new emphasis on social life and social concerns, including the role of women in both private and public life; that witnessed a comparable shift away from the sanctity of nature to a new emphasis on the discoveries of natural science, including those of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin; and that marked the unprecedented expansion of British industry and the utmost extension of the British Empire. The course will explore these developments as well as other developments in religion, art, culture and the Victorian imagination in the poetry of Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, as well as the non-fiction prose of Carlyle, Hazlitt, Darwin, Marx, Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde, and/or others representative of the period.