Readings in 19th-Century English Literature

3 units

Primarily reading the works of two novelists - Eliot and Trollope - and two poets - Tennyson and Browning - we will look at how literary culture sought to challenge, reform, and convey religious authority. Beginning with an overview of the ideas of three theorists of an irreligious modernity - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - we will then focus on the creative writing of our major authors. Some attention will fall upon the prophets of religious decline and problems of belief; more often we will observe how writers and readers became essential agents in the experiment of constructing communities where the expression and toleration of religious dissent became an ideal. Likewise, we will mostly stop our ears to the manifestoes of theologians in favor of listening to redeeming conversations and arguments about liberty and duty, pleasure and pain, life and death.