Topics in 19th Century Lit

Catalog description

Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist writers in both Britain and the United States were fascinated by Italy. Shelly and Byron were inspired by the hope of a new political dawn in the Italian Risorgimento. Robert Browning, George Eliot, and E. M. Forster saw the transition from Medieval to Renaissance culture in Florence as mirroring and offering an example for their own struggles to free themselves from the repression and religious orthodoxy of Victorian England. Henry James and Edith Wharton saw Italy as beautiful and dangerous in equal measure and used it as the setting of stories about the clash of old world and new world cultures. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were both profoundly influenced by Dante. As you can see, the "Italy and Italians" of the title refers not only to images and characters in the works of the British and American authors we will be reading but also to the influences of Italian literature on literature in English. Recurring themes in the course will be history and its uses in literature, gender and sexuality, democracy and aristocracy, language and power, and religion as an instrument of sexual repression. There will also be theoretical components, introducing you to various critical approaches to literature: psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, post-colonial studies, and Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence.