Wilde World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores literature, culture and the arts toward the end of the nineteenth-century. The emphasis is on British materials, with some special attentions to Oscar Wilde, the most famous literary figure of this so-called fin de siecle (French for "end of the century"). But the course also surveys the period's kaleidoscopic array of personalities, movements and themes--both national and international. We encounter artistic and social innovations; radical political philosophies and schemes; debates concerning women's roles in the public sphere; new understandings of human psychology and altered mental states; various sexualities and an emergent medicalized sexology; theories of race, evolution and degeneration; and Britain's increasingly complex colonial and imperial involvements. In addition to long and short fictions, poetry, and essays, we will look into art history, book history, and other cultural formations. Longer fictions beyond Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray might include Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Sara Jeannette Duncan's novel of British India Set in Authority. Students may choose among two different assignment structures for papers, with each structure sharing some smaller tasks: one option is to create four short papers over the term; the other option, which will have a midterm declaration deadline, involves writing two short papers and also one longer and more research-intensive paper, the latter counting as two short papers but carrying its own guidelines and criteria.