Victorian Literature

(6 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course covers a period of transition into what we know as "modern" and "modernist" literature-but it is also a period of striking modernity in its own right. The literature reveals an intense and fascinating self-scrutiny on the part of nations as well as the individual. In our first classes we will be looking at how Britain responds to vast industrial, technological change by asking what this means for society and culture, and how America assert its independence in a philosophical and literary movement championing self-knowledge. Our tutorials will address new developments in literary form which reflect these social changes: the dramatic monologue, the social problem novel, the realist novel and stage melodrama. We will be looking, too, at the proliferation of female authorship against a background of social change. A theme running across this course is the role and status of art and aesthetics in a world adapting to new forms of knowledge, and our two classes in the second half of term will look at particular cultural debates that emerge in the period: over whether science and the arts can represent a unified culture, and whether the pursuit of beauty and an immersion in aesthetics can be understood as a vocation in itself, untouched by social and moral concerns.