Faith and Doubt

3 credits

Was the Victorian Age really one of a crisis of faith, of spreading doubt in the hoary old conventions of Christianity which marked a necessary passage to Modernism and Modernity? Or was the apparent growth of secularism in the British 19th century a mark of something else altogether? This course examines the literature of faith and doubt, from the poems of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell from the perspective of new scholarship on Victorian religion, inviting critics to take seriously, as did the Victorians themselves, their own thinking about religion and the spiritual life. *Note: This course is intended for ENGL Honours students. Students who are not ENGL Honours students require permission of the Department Head to register.*