ENGH 336: British Novel of the 19th Century

ENGH 336-001: British Novel of the 19th Century
(Fall 2011)

10:30 AM to 11:45 AM TR

West Building 1007

Section Information for Fall 2011

Victorian England was the golden age of the novel, a literary form uniquely suited to charting the complicated inner lives of its characters as well as the larger social networks in which those lives assumed meaning.  It was an era in which Prime Ministers could weep over the death of a Dickens heroine and readers of serialized fiction could influence an author to kill off an unpopular character.  At a time when the middle classes were rapidly increasing their political and economic status, the novel played an important role in constructing class and gneder differences that were crucial to their claims for cultural power as well.  Women asserted considerable influence in this process as female novelists came of age as professional authors.  Victorian novelists turned a keen and often satiric eye on the ways modern capitalism, individualism, and industrialization were reshaping traditional values and personal relationships.  As they explored the ideological dilemmas of contemporary life and invented fictional solutions to resolve them, they created characters who live out their immortality in the popular imagination today.  Authors studied in this course will include Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthonly Trollope, and Thomas Hardy.  Students should be prepared to keep up with the 300 pages of reading a week.  Required work will include quizzes, several analytical papers and tests, and a final examination.

Course Information from the University Catalog