COURSE DESCRIPTION

Program Status:  This course can be applied toward fulfilling part of the requirements for several possible program “tracks,” including but not limited to the Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies program tracks.

This course will study later Victorian poetry, drama, painting, graphic arts, short fiction, contemporary (Victorian) works of criticism and critical theory (and will provide an opportunity to study Victorian music, architecture, novels, and historiography).  Besides being intrinsically interesting, these works will provide a means of examining the period’s varying views of art and aesthetics, especially as they evolved into fin-de-siècle and early modernist theories of—and the quasi-“interventionist” movements that were variously called—Aestheticism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau.

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, Picasso, and others)—the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, Pater, Dowson, Symons, Wilde, Beardsley, and some of the more prominent women “Decadents,” such as Egerton, D’Arcy, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and others.

Many writers, artists, and dandies in the late nineteenth century felt themselves positioned between a High Victorian poetics they found no longer efficacious and the prospect of a wholly “decentered,” relativistic, and “undecidable” modernist metaphysics.  In response, these intellectuals sought, though through different means, to embrace a “Religion of Art.”  They embodied (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) the irony of an iconoclastic status quo, a conservational avant-garde, a salvational decadence—whether their efforts resembled Ruskin’s apocalyptic dread or the sort of “camp” sensibility described by Susan Sontag.  How they did it, where their efforts led, and even what their solutions implied are all questions the course will address.

The course will try specifically to organize your efforts around developing tangible professional skills, particularly the production of a publishable professional article.
 

SCHEDULE (subject to modest negotiation)

Week  1
Introduction—background; slides of High Victorian & Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Week 2
Alfred Lord Tennyson—“The Poet,” “The Lady of Shalott”
Pre-Raphaelite & other Victorian Paintings (slides continued)
William Michael Rossetti—“The Brotherhood in a Nutshell,” “Notes on Paintings”
Holman Hunt—“The Impact of Ruskin”
Misc. critical reactions: “Controversy and Ideology”
John Ruskin—“Letters to the Times,” “Notes on some Paintings,” “Pre-Raphaelitism”
Articles on John Everett Millais by Laurel Bradley and Pamela Tamarkin Reis, from Victorian Studies journal
[Packets #1 & #2; c. 60 pages]

Week 3
John Ruskin—from “Of Truth of Space”; from “The Naturalist Ideal”; from “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”; from “The Nature of Gothic”; from “Roman Renaissance”; “Grotesque Renaissance”
[Packet #2; c. 200 pages]
——PROJECT SELECTION DUE——

Week 4
Walter Pater—The Renaissance; Greek Studies 250-55, Plato & Platonism 103-108, “Style,” “Child in the House,” “Emerald Uthwart,” “Prince of Court Painters,” “Sebastian von Storck”
[Hill text and Packet #3;  c. 400 pages, plus notes]
——BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE——

Week 5
Arthur Symons, “Ernest Dowson”
Ernest Dowson—Poetry: “In Preface: For Adelaide,” “Vita summa brevis,” “A Coronal,” “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” “Villanelle of Sunset,” “My Lady April,” “To One in Bedlam,” “Ad Domnulam Suam,” “Amor Umbratilis,” “Yvonne of Brittany,” “Benedictio Domini,” “Growth,” “Ad Manus Puellae,” “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” “Vanitas,” “Exile,” “Spleen,” “O Mors! Quam Amara Est Memoria,” “You would have understood me had you waited,” “April Love,” “Vain Hope,” “Vain Resolves,” “A Requiem,” “Beata Solitudo,” “Terre Promise,” “Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures,” “Gray Nights,” “The Garden of Shadow,” “Vesperal,” “Extreme Unction,” “Amantium Irae,” “Impenetentia Ultima,” “A Valediction,” “Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,” “Seraphita,” “Epigram,” “Beyond,” “Carthusians,” “Three Witches,” “Saint Germaine-en-Laye,” “To His Mistress,” “The Sea-Change,” “Dregs,” “Venite Descendamus,” “Transition,” “Exchanges,” “A Last Word”
Dowson—Fiction: Introduction, “Souvenirs of an Egoist,” “The Diary of a Successful Man,” “A Case of Conscience,” “The Fortunate Islands,” “Absinthia Taetra,” “The Visit,” “The Princess of Dreams”
[Packet #4; c. 165 pages]

Week 6
Arthur Symons—Criticism: “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” “The World as Ballet”
Symons—Poetry:  “Preface to the Second Edition of Silhouettes: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli,” “Eyes,” “Morbidezza,” “Maquillage,” “Impression,” “On Meeting After,” “Emmy,” “The Absinthe-Drinker,” “Javanese Dancers,” “Preface to 2nd Edition of London Nights,” “Prologue: In the Stalls,” “To a  Dancer,” “Renée,” “Nora on the Pavement,” “Violet: Prelude,” “Violet: Air de Ballet,” “Violet: La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge,” “Violet: At the Ambassadeurs,” “Stella Maris,” “Hallucination: I,” “Hallucination: II,” “Flora of the Eden: Antwerp,” “White Heliotrope,” “Nerves,” “Madrigal: I,” “In the Sanctuary at Saronno,” “Bianca: Bianca,” “Bianca: Benedictine,” “Epilogue: Credo”
Symons—Fiction: “Esther Kahn,” “Christian Trevalga,” “The Death of Peter Waydelin”
[Packet #5; c. 120 pages; note: excludes Symbolist Movement in Literature]

Week 7
Symons—Symbolist Movement in Literature
[Packet #5; c. 180 pages]

Week 8
Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas)—“Peacocks: A Mood,” “The Masquerade,” “Hyacinthus,” “The White Statue,” “Statues,” “Candle-Light,” “Pierrot”
Mary E. Coleridge—“‘He knoweth not that the dead are thine,’” “The Other Side of the Mirror,” “A Clever Woman,” “Solo,” “‘I envy not the dead that rest,’” “‘True to myself am I, and false to all,’” “Mortal Combat,” “Friends—With a Difference,” “Master and Guest,” “The Witch,” “The Contents of an Ink-bottle,” “The Witches’ Wood,” “A Day-dream,” “Unwelcome,” “The White Women,” “Marriage”
Charlotte Mew—“Pécheresse,” “At the Convent Gate,” “The Farmer’s Bride,” “Fame,” “Ken,” “A Quoi Bon Dire,” “On the Asylum Road,” “The Forest Road,” “Not for That City,” “Ne Me Tangito,” “An Ending,” “A Question”
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,” “The Rescue,” “Venus and Mars,” “The Death of Procris,” “The Magdalen,” “A Pen-Drawing of Leda,” “Prologue,” “The Woods Are Still,” “And On My Eyes Dark Sleep By Night,” “‘Maids, not to you my mind doth change,’” “‘Come, Gorgo, put the rug in place,’” “A Portrait,” “‘So jealous of your beauty,’” “‘Love rises up some days,’” “‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’” “‘A Girl,’” “‘I sing thee with the stock-dove’s throat,’” “‘Unbosoming,’” “‘As two fair vessels side by side,’” “‘It was deep April,’” “Penetration,” “To the Winter Aphrodite,”  “Embalmment,” “Nests in Elms,” “‘I love you with my life,’” “The Mummy Invokes his Soul,” “Ebbtide at Sundown,” “Life Plastic,” “Eros,” “Constancy,” “Your Rose is Dead,” “A Palimpsest,” “Trinity,” “A Picture,” “Across A Gaudy Room,” “L’indifférent”
Charles Baudelaire—“Un Voyage à Cythère” [“A Voyage to Cythera”]
John Gray—“On a Picture,” “Poem,” “A Crucifix,” “Parsifal Imitated,” “Femmes Damnées,” “Le Voyage à Cythère,” “Mishka,” “Charleville”
Lionel Johnson—“The Cultured Faun,” “The Church of a Dream,” “Mystic and Cavalier,” “To a Passionist,” “In Honor of Dorian and His Creator,” “The Destroyer of a Soul,” “The Dark Angel,” “Nihilism,” “A Decadent’s Lyric”
Richard Le Gallienne—“The Décadent to His Soul”
Oscar Wilde—“Hélas,” “Requiescat,” “Symphony in Yellow,” “The Harlot’s House,” “On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters,” “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
[Packet #6 and Portable Oscar Wilde; c. 160 pages]

Week 9
Eliza Lynn Linton—“The Wild Women As Social Insurgents” (1891)
Mona Alison Caird—“A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” (1892)
Sarah Grand—“The New Aspect of the Woman Question” (1894)
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright]—“The Little Gray Glove,” “A Lost Masterpiece,” “Wedlock”
Ella D'Arcy—“The Death Mask,” “Irremediable,” “At Twickenham”
Ada Leverson—“The Quest of Sorrow”
Hubert Crackanthorpe—critical essay “Reticence in Literature”
[Packet #7; c. 200 pages]
—— STATEMENT OF THESIS DUE——

Week 10
Max Beerbohm—“A Defence of Cosmetics”
James McNeill Whistler—“Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885)
Wilde—Introduction, “Dates in the Life of Oscar Wilde,” “The Critic As Artist,” “Soul of Man Under Socialism,” De Profundis, “Wildean Wit from Comedies,” “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
[Packet #8; c. 400 pages]
——OUTLINE DUE——

Week 11 
Wilde—from Complete Shorter Fiction: Introduction, “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Birthday of the Infanta,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Star-Child”; Picture of Dorian Gray
[Complete Shorter Fiction and Portable Oscar Wilde; c. 350 pages]

Week 12
Wilde—Salome, The Importance of Being Ernest [in Portable Oscar Wilde]
Arthur Pinero—The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
[Packet #8; c. 180 pages]
——DRAFT OF TERM PAPER DUE——

Week 13
Aubrey Beardsley—Salome pictures from Best of Beardsley
Symons—“Aubrey Beardsley,” “Studies in Strange Sins (After Beardsley’s Designs)”
[Best of Beardsley and Packet #5; c. 30 pages, plus 16 pictures]
 
Week 14
Aubrey Beardsley—“The Three Musicians,” “Ballad of the Barber,” The Story of Venus & Tannhäuser
Gray—“The Barber”
Beardsley—Best of Beardsley pictures (slides/reproductions & discussion)
[Best of Beardsley and Packet #8; c. 60 pages, plus approximately 100 pictures]
 
Week 15
Beardsley’s Best of Beardsley pictures (continued)
——TERM PAPER DUE——