Victorian Self and Society

This multi-genre course is an introduction to literature and culture of the Victorian period, looking at the changing ideas of society and the individual's place within that larger community in an age of empire, industrialization, urbanization, class conflict, and religious crisis. Topics include conceptions of the role of art and culture in society, the railway mania of the 1840s, the "great stink" of London, women's suffrage and the condition of women, and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Readings will include Carlyle, Charlotte Brontë, Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dickens, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll.