Bohemia: Glamorous Outcasts & the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Undergraduate

Bohemia - an urban underworld of social outcasts, struggling artists, and political conspirators - is one of the most enduring fantasies to emerge out of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, the figure of the Bohemian had become central to a cosmopolitan literary culture eager to assert its autonomy from the marketplace and restrictive notions of nationality. It had also become bound up with a range of anxieties fixated on cultural decadence, racial degeneration, transgressive sexuality, political revolution and the occult. This course will study a series of novels that foreground these issues, including Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray , George Gissing's New Grub Street , George Du Maurier's Trilby and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent . We will also glance ahead to early twentieth-century texts like Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer .