Instructor: Heller R 12:30 PM – 3:20 PM
Topic: History, Get Me Rewrite: Past and Present in Victorian Literature
Course Description:
Victorian writers were obsessed with the past, though they defined it in different ways. For some, the past was a dark age of outmoded beliefs; for others, it provided the key to solving modern problems. The Victorian age itself was a period of tumultuous historical change, as well as of anxieties about the way these changes redefined class relations, gender roles, and national and racial identity. In this course, we’ll sample critical approaches to Victorian literature by focusing on texts from the period that address both past and present history. Readings will include poems that reflect the Victorian fascination with medievalism and the Renaissance, Charles Dickens’s retelling of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational rendering of class and gender rebellion in Lady Audley’s Secret (1861), Wilkie Collins’s response to British imperialism in his groundbreaking mystery novel The Moonstone (1868), and the aesthete Vernon Lee’s gender-bending, supernatural tales from the fin-de-siècle. Assignments include a short and a longer paper, as well as participation in a roundtable where a student group leads discussion on critical essays on the reading.