Advanced Studies In Victorian Literature

This course allows students to take a more focused approach to Victorian literature and culture. By providing a thematic, rather than a chronological, introduction to a number of nineteenth-century literary texts, it aims to show that the shifts in literary representations at the time were part of an extremely versatile cultural scene that belies any retrospective typecasting of "Victorianism." The comparison of canonical Victorian works and only recently reprinted material, primarily by long forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, will help us to understand the literary developments that engendered a plethora of controversies, both at the time and in its wake, brought out such a versatility of works, and perhaps above all, created the novel genre as the Victorian era's most popular, critical, and representative form of cultural expression.