Long Victorian Novels

Catalog description

This course will give students the opportunity to read two popular Victorian novels not usually taught on the quarter system: George Eliot's Middlemarch and Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Both novels foundational to the realist universe of criticism are famously filled with intricate plots involving many, many characters whose lives are all interconnected. The course will give us a chance to survey the poetics of brilliant stylists and the social complexities in Britain of the time: while Eliot situates her novel in the countryside, Dickens situates most of the action of the plot in the heart of London. To work our way through these novels slowly and carefully, we will take inspiration from how the Victorians read them, in their serialized installments published at regular intervals. Focusing on slow reading will also give us time to try out different kinds of reading; this course will function as an introductory survey of critical and theoretical approaches to the novel and will be particularly useful to undergraduate students seeking advanced coursework in literary studies. Critical and theoretical readings could include Mikhail Bakhtin, Gyorgy Lukacs, Edward Said, Sharon Marcus, Leah Price, Raymond Williams, and Alex Woloch among others.