English 333 Nineteenth Century Literature in English (not American) Kuykendall 408 MWF 12:30-1:20
British Nineteenth Century writing is a highlight in that country’s literary history. The century begins with arguably its finest cluster of major poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats—and the century’s prose fiction achievements are just as impressive—Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy, just to mention the traditional high points. It is also a period of remarkable intellectual prose—de Quincey, Carlyle, Macaulay, Martineau, Mayhew, Darwin, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde are among the most prominent producers. And I haven’t even mentioned Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, the Rossettis, and a host of other distinguished poets of the later decades.
In short, there is too much to cover, so we will take samplings from the major clusters of writers. We will read chronologically, but also organize the material by certain themes that obsessed the writers of the period—the relationship between art and science, the costs and benefits of empire, the condition of women question, and the social consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization.
Sources of evaluation will be attendance and class participation, a series of short papers, regular weekly postings in preparation for reading, memorization assignments, prose and poetry imitations, and a substantial final paper or research project, involving a class presentation.
Texts:
Abrams et. al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature—The Romantic Period. 9th Edition
Abrams et. al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature—The Victorian Age. 9th Edition
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines