ENL 6256:
THE VICTORIAN FIN
DE SIÈCLE:
ITS PARADIGMS AND
MYTHOLOGIES
Dr. C.
Snodgrass; 4336 Turlington; 376-8362 (home) or 278-8362 (cell);
snod@english.ufl.edu
© Chris Snodgrass 2008
COURSE
DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
For a long time now,
literary/cultural criticism has accepted the established proposition
that cultural paradigms and the social “narratives” supporting them are
constructions of a particular historical moment, not natural
laws. It
is therefore intriguing whenever modern criticism clings to rather
fixed ideological representations
of distant historical periods, even as it ostensibly identifies a
period’s paradigms and gender politics as evolving cultural
constructions. Some of the more striking
examples of this kind of blind spot in Victorian studies revolve around
the fin de siècle. This course will focus on a broad
cross-section of noteworthy texts, both
written and visual, from that key strain of the 1890s routinely
referred to as the “Decadence” and investigate the cultural
assumptions
underlying a few
late-nineteenth-century “mythologies.” It will not be our focus to
explain why certain prejudices about the late-Victorian era have
resisted normal revisionism, but along
the way you may be able to draw some conclusions about that.
We will be reading from a few critical discussions of the Victorian fin de siècle and its key paradigmatic cultural ideas from both contemporary and present-day commentators, as well as some commentaries touching on concepts of the grotesque, in order to examine how the cultural paradigms they reference were embedded in a large number of Victorian poems, short fiction, plays, and visual images. The visual images that bombarded the late-Victorian period will be considered as texts equal in interest to written texts.
We’ll be surveying a broad range of individual works by both familiar and relatively unfamiliar (“non-canonical”) figures. Among the specific figures we’ll study are John Ruskin; Walter Pater; French writers Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire; “decadent” icons Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley; the poet, fiction writer, and premier critic Arthur Symons; J. M. Whistler; Max Beerbohm; the iconic lyric poet Ernest Dowson; poet Olive Custance (wife of the notorious Alfred Douglas); poet Mathilda Blind (who endowed Newnham College, Cambridge); fiction writers Henry Harland (literary editor of the notorious Yellow Book) and Hubert Crackanthrope; acclaimed poets Lionel Johnson and John Gray; “decadent” eccentrics Eric Stenbock, Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe), and Alfred Douglas; the New Woman fiction writer Ella D’Arcy; fiction writer and essayist Vernon Lee (Violet Paget); feminist poet Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott-Watson); poet and playwright Michael Field (pseudonym for lesbian aunt-and-niece collaborators); novelist John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie), of course, scores of Victorian painters.
The course will try specifically to organize your efforts toward producing a strong conference paper that can be realistically converted into a publishable professional article. Approximately 50% of the final grade will depend on the term paper and the supporting bibliographical work and scholarship. The other 50% will be based on the quality of weekly reading notes and the degree of preparation for and participation in the discussions of the scheduled course material. While most of the weekly assignments do not explicitly include critical theory — and a sophisticated knowledge of literary theory is in no way a prerequisite — you will be encouraged to employ whatever theoretical perspectives you know to help illuminate the issues under study.
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.