COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course will study later Victorian poetry, drama, painting, graphic arts, short fiction, and contemporary (Victorian) works of criticism and critical theory as a means of examining the period's varying views of art and aesthetics, especially as they evolved toward fin-de-siècle and early modernist theories of aestheticism, decadence, and Art Nouveau.  While providing some background in “High Victorian” painting and aesthetic assumptions (from Tennyson, Arnold, and Ruskin), the course will treat particularly the works of prominent and influential late Victorian Aesthetes and Decadents (influential to Victorians as well as to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Faulkner, etc.)—the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, Dowson, Symons, Wilde, Beardsley, and some of the more prominent women “Decadents.”

Besides attempting to enhance the student's perspective on and understanding of the works and issues of this period, the course will also try specifically to organize the student's efforts toward producing a publishable professional article.
 

SCHEDULE (subject to modest negotiation)

Week  1
Introduction to the course
Introduction—background
Slides of High Victorian & Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Week 2
Alfred Lord Tennyson—“The Poet,” “Mariana,” “The Lady of Shalott”
D. G. Rossetti—“Blessed Damozel,” “Sudden Light,” “Love First Remembered,” “Card Dealer,” “Jenny,” selections from The House of Life: “Bridal Birth,” “Nuptial Sleep,” “Secret Parting,” “Stillborn Love,” “Vain Virtues,” “A Superscription,” “Silent Noon,” “Heart’s Haven,” “Love's Fatality,” “Transfigured Life”
Swinburne—selections from Poems and Ballads (1866): “A Ballad of Death,” “Laus Veneris,” “The Leper,” “Anactoria,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Faustine,” “Dolores”; “Hertha”

Week 3
Arnold—“Preface to Poems” (1853),” “Study of Poetry,” “Function of Criticism in the Present Time,” “Wordsworth,” “Keats,” “Shelley,” “Literature and Science,” “Influence of the Academies”; selections from Culture and Anarchy
Ruskin—“Truth of Space,” “The Naturalist Ideal,” “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” “Nature of Gothic,” “The Renaissance Ideal”
——BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE——

Week 4
Pater—The Renaissance; Greek Studies 250-55; Plato & Platonism 103-108; “Postscript: Romanticism,” “Diaphaneité,” “Style”

Week 5
Pater—“Child in the House,” “Emerald Uthwart,” “Prince of Court Painters,” “Sebastian von Storck,” “Denys L’Axxerois,” “Apollo in Picardy”

Week 6
Arthur Symons, “Ernest Dowson”
Ernest Dowson—Poetry: “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” “Carthusians,” “Benedictio Domini,” “To One in Bedlam,” “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” “O Mors! Quam Amara Est Memoria,” “Villanelle at Sunset,” “Extreme Unction,” “Exile,” “Spleen,” “A Last Word,” “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longtam,” “Growth,” “Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,” “You would have understood me had you waited,” “Vain Hope,” “Three Witches,” “Dregs,” “My Lady April,” “Yvonne in Brittany,” “Ad Domnulam Suam,” “A Requiem,” “Beata Solitudo,” “Terre Promise,” “Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures,” “Gray Nights,” “Vesperal,” “The Garden of Shadow,” “Impenetentia Ultima,” “A Valediction,” “To His Mistress,” “In a Breton Cemetery,” “The Sea-Change,” “Saint Germaine-en-Laye,” “Venite Descendamus,” “Transition”;
Dowson—Fiction: “The Fortunate Islands,” “The Princess of Dreams,” “Souvenirs of an Egoist,” “The Diary of a Successful Man,” “A Case of Conscience,” “An Orchestral Violin”

Week 7
Arthur Symons—“The Decadent Movement in Literature,” “Preface to the Second Edition of Silhouettes: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli,” “Preface to 2nd Edition of London Nights”
Symons—Poetry:  “Emmy,” “Maquillage,” “Morbidezza,” “Prologue: Before the Curtain,” “Prologue: In the Stalls,” “To a  Dancer,” “Violet: La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge,” “Javanese Dancers,” “By the Pool at the Third Rosses,” “Hallucination,” “Violet: Prelude,” “Nora on the Pavement,” “White Heliotrope,” “Nerves,” “Stella Maris”
Symons—Fiction: “A Prelude to Life,” “Esther Kahn,” “Christian Trevalga,” “The Death of Peter Waydelin”
Lionel Johnson—“The Destroyer of a Soul,” “The Dark Angel,” “Nihilism,” “A Decadent’s Lyric”

Week 8
Symons—Symbolist Movement in Literature, other selected criticism
Charles Baudelaire—“Un Voyage à Cythère,” “Moon Offended,” “The Mask,” “Hymn to Beauty,” “Lethe,” “The Confession”
John Gray—“Le Voyage à Cythère”
Selections (translated) by Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé
Wilde—“Symphony in Yellow,” “The Harlot’s House,” “Impression du Matin,” “Hélas,” “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Week 9
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright]—“A Lost Masterpiece”
Ella D'Arcy—“The Death Mask,” “Irremediable”
Michael Field [Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper]—“From Baudelaire,” “The Poet,” “A Dance of Death,” “La Gioconda,” “A Dying Viper,” “Song” from “The Tragic Mary”
Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas)—“Peacocks: A Mood,” “The Masquerade,” “Hyacinthus,” “The White Statue,” “Statues,” “Candle-Light,” “Pierrot”
Alice Meynell—“Veni Creator,” “The Visiting Sea,” “The Young Neophyte,” “To the Body,” “Summer in England, 1914,” “The Threshing-Machine”
Dollie Radford—“Spring-Song,” “Song,” “Return of the Troops”
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget]—from Miss Brown (1884)

Week 10
Wilde—“Decay of Lying,” “Truth of Masks,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Critic As Artist,” “Soul of Man Under Socialism”
James McNeill Whistler—“Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885)

Week 11
Wilde—Complete Shorter Fiction; Picture of Dorian Gray; Salome

Week 12
Wilde—Lady Windermere's Fan; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Ernest
——LAST DATE FOR SUBMITTING DRAFT OF TERM PAPER——

Week 13
Wilde—De Profundis, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Week 14
Beardsley—“Ballad of the Barber,” “The Three Musicians,” The Story of Venus & Tannhäuser; Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
John Gray—“The Barber”
Beerbohm—“In Defence of Cosmetics”
Beardsley’s Pictures and other fin-de-siècle art and posters  (slides/reproductions & discussion)
Symons, “Studies in Strange Sins (After Beardsley's Designs)”

Week 15
Beardsley’s Pictures (slides/reproductions & discussion)
——TERM PAPER DUE——