This course will help fulfill the requirements for a number of the curriculum “tracks” for a department major, including but not limited to the British Literature, British and American Literature, and American Literature tracks.

Course Description

This course will attempt to define the world-views, beliefs, doubts, anxieties, and paradoxes of the Victorian Period through a survey of the poetry, fiction, drama, pictures, and critical theory of a few representative artists. If you like reading Victorian novels, you should love much of the material in the course. However, be aware that this is not the Victorian Novel course--that course is ENL 3122. In this course (ENL 3251) we will be reading very few novels; rather, the course is mostly designed to introduce you to many of the other artistic forms--and broad intellectual history--of the Victorian Age, one of the most interesting and influential periods in Western history.

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 as well as the themes themselves--including an investigation of related cultural issues. The material in the course will be grouped under one of four broad thematic categories: the century's "Crisis of Faith" (Tennyson and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); the clash in shifting assumptions between Romanticism and Victorianism (Browning, High Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painting); the "battle of the sexes," or issues arising from various drives for "female emancipation" ["The Woman Question"] (women fiction writers and popular drama); and "counter-cultural" fin-de-siècle artistic movements, particularly Aestheticism and the Decadence (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, with respect to any particular subject matter, 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 below) 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.

While you will surely learn in this course a great deal about Victorian literature and culture, I believe it is even more important for you to learn sophisticated skills that will transfer valuably to almost any subject matter--particularly, a precision in critical thinking and a sensitivity to the subtleties and nuances of language. I intend that the Victorian texts in the course, however interesting they may be in themselves, will also serve as the raw material on which you can hone such skills.