Victorian Lit and Culture

Catalog description

Counts as one of the two 3000-level courses for English majors. Also fulfills the YC. Writing-Intensive requirement. Nineteenth-century British texts beg for interdisciplinary approaches, best represented by the movements in critical theory called New Historicism and Cultural Studies, which updated and transformed the Victorian Studies movement. Novels like Dickens' Hard Times focused explicitly on societal crises, while poets like Tennyson took on social and moral responsibilities, which many Victorians came to feel the Romantics had shirked. Darwin, geology, and contemporary scholarship led many people to question their religious beliefs and their views about human nature. Political developments led them to question their beliefs about men, women, and representative government. In what ways did each text describe or replicate social fault lines? Did the authors' ideas about how to palliate or eliminate social problems go far enough, or could they have gone further? Readings will cluster around radical cultural developments such as industrialization, urbanization, democratization, and evolution, as unprecedented circumstances propelled writers toward new styles, forms, and positions. Through this course, you will learn to read texts closely, to interpret literature as part of a cultural and social fabric, to imagine (provisionally) what various works meant to the authors' contemporaries, and to realize why modern and Victorian interpretations of the same work inevitably diverge. Prerequisite(s): BUS 1010 or FYWR 1020 .