Victorian Literature

AY2015/2016 Semester 2

Victorian Literature provides an introduction to some of the best literary works of the nineteenth century, while drawing attention to neglected aspects of this extremely versatile, fast changing, and intriguingly self-conscious age. The course aims to foster excitement about the indeterminacies, doubts, and fissures that shaped the Victorian period?s greatest cultural achievements. At the same time, we shall critically reconsider the many legacies of the shifts it saw in epistemological, cultural, and specifically literary conceptualisations. The material discussed this semester will include novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins, one of Arthur Conan Doyle?s Sherlock Holmes stories, a play by Oscar Wilde, as well as a selection of poems and paintings.