ENG 5550 Studies in Victorian Literature

The Victorian era was one of intense social change. Industrial development, class instability, and the age of Empire produced new possibilities to rise (or fall) in the world, generated attachment to a disappearing past, and challenged old assumptions about values, about English society, about human nature itself. The course will study literature in this historical and cultural context, and within the context of contemporary literary criticism and literary theory. The course will study writers such as Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. The instructor will select specific writers and texts based on the theme (such as a specific topic, genre, or writer) chosen for the course.
Credits: 3.0