Empire, Urbanization, Aesthetics: Literature of the Global Victorian Era

3 Credits

An age of cultural, political, and aesthetic upheaval, the Victorian period was a time of enormous social change: working-class agitation, struggles for women's rights, industrialization, imperial aggression, scientific discovery, and shifting ideas about race and colonialism. Through the study of novels, poems, and non-fiction prose, this course will consider how literature of the British nineteenth century engages with the disordered age in which it was composed. Authors may include Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and Mary Seacole, among others.