ENL 3251 VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Dr. C. Snodgrass; 4336
Turlington; 376-8362; snod@english.ufl.edu
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
This course will help fulfill
the requirements for a number of the curriculum “tracks” for a department
major, including but not limited to the Cultural Studies, British
Literature and British
and American Literature
tracks.
Course
Description
This course will attempt to define the
world-views, beliefs, doubts, anxieties, and paradoxes of the Victorian Period,
one of the most interesting and influential periods in Western history, through
a survey of the poetry, fiction, drama, pictures, and critical
theory of a few representative artists. Be aware that this is not the Victorian Novel course — that course is ENL 3122. In this
course (ENL 3251) we will be reading quite a bit of fiction but no novels
except the Stevenson novella. Rather, the course is mostly designed to
introduce you to many of the other artistic forms — and broad intellectual
history —of the Victorian Age.
We will try to probe the assumptions
which underlie the works of art we will be studying — the “why’s” implicit in
the artists’ approaches to their themes and their unrelenting quest for the meaning of things — including an
investigation of related cultural issues. The material in the course will
be grouped under one of three broad thematic categories:
A. Questioning God,
Country, & Culture: This section investigates the age’s various doubts
about religion, culture, and science (through selected works by Tennyson and
Arnold, and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde);
B. Passion,
Identity, and the “Woman Question”: This section investigates the issues
arising from trying to define appropriate forms of passion, one’s ‘essential’
identity, and various forms of the “battle of the sexes” (through selected
works by women fiction writers and popular drama); and
C. Life, Art, and
Counterculture: This section investigates “counter-cultural” fin-de-siècle
artistic movements, particularly Aestheticism and what was derisively and
inaccurately labeled the “Decadence” (through selected works by Oscar Wilde and
Aubrey Beardsley).
Goals and Expectations
All knowledge begins with and
depends on the ability to read data accurately and logically. Therefore, throughout
this course, but certainly by the end of it, you will be expected to be able to
demonstrate that you can
- Read accurately what the work says, and determine how it goes about saying what it says effectively;
- Establish what the premises of the work seem to be, that is, what the implicit concerns of the writer are, what world-view is implied or assumed; and
- Trace how these thematic patterns and philosophical issues or problems differ from writer to writer during the period.
The course assignments (and
other requirements detailed in the syllabus, the course policies, and the basis
for your final grade) are designed to ensure that you will have every
opportunity to achieve (or enhance) these skills during the course of the term,
assuming a normal amount of conscientious effort.
Course
Rules
Basis
for Final Grades
Syllabus:
Reading Schedule
Possible
Secondary Readings