Literature and the Culture of Capitalism

This course will examine the literary responses to capitalism in terms of five organizing tropes: regionalism, urbanization, consumerism, aestheticism, and modernism. Our investigation will begin sometime in the early 19th-century with the moment that consolidated conditions favorable for industrialization and conclude in the first decade of the 20th-century with literary modernism and the collapse of the cultural myths of progressive enlightenment and democracy. Readings include texts by Wordsworth, Malthus, Sue, Mayhew, Marx, H. Rider Haggard, Stowe, Carroll, Zola, Wilde, Stoker, Freud. Three papers and a final essay.