English 55: The Victorian Novel
Fall 2000
TR 9-10:30
This course provides an introduction to the Victorian novel. We will focus our attention on some of the major fiction of the period, attending to issues of style and form as well as to how the novel participates in Victorian debates about poverty, sexuality, morality, change, and imperialism. Tracking recurrent literary obsessions with questions of justice, nervousness, contagion, consumption, desire, depravity, and, not surprisingly, reading, we will study how the Victorian novel helped an emergent industrial society imagine itself into being.
Please familarize yourself with the course policies and requirements.
Sept. 7 Introduction
Sept. 12 Pickwick Papers
Sept. 14 Pickwick Papers
Sept. 19 Jane Eyre
Sept. 21 Jane Eyre
Sept. 26 Jane Eyre;Reviews
Sept. 28 Jane Eyre; Showalter, from Female Malady
Oct. 3 Amos Barton
Oct. 5 Amos Barton; "Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists";
"Natural History of German Life"
Oct. 10 No Name
Oct. 12 No Name; FIRST PAPER DUE
FALL BREAK
Oct. 17 No Name
Oct. 19 No Name
Oct. 24 Our Mutual Friend
Oct. 26 Our Mutual Friend
Oct. 31 Our Mutual Friend; Selections from Mayhew
Nov. 2 Our Mutual Friend; Stallybrass and White,
"The City"
Nov. 7 Our Mutual Friend; "The Function of
Criticism
at the Present Time"
Nov. 9 Our Mutual Friend; Reviews of Dickens
Nov. 14 Daisy Miller
Nov. 16 Daisy Miller
Nov. 21 James, from the "Art of Fiction"
Nov. 23 THANKSGIVING
Nov. 28 Jude the Obscure
Nov. 30 Jude the Obscure
Dec. 5 Jude the Obscure
Dec. 7 Jude the Obscure; synthesis
Dec. 14 FINAL PAPER DUE