English 334A--Spring 2021
The Late Victorian Novel
In this course we will study four very important novels published in the second half of the 19th century in England, in the following order:
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray
These are long novels, so be prepared to spend a lot of time reading them. We will be covering 200-240 pages per week, which comes out to about 70-80 pages per class. Middlemarch is difficult reading, so you should also be prepared to expend some extra sweat on the prose; but Middlemarch is also one of the greatest novels ever written. (The author of Middlemarch, by the way, was actually a woman, Mary Anne Evans, who used the masculine pseudonym “George Eliot”). The Woman in White is a detective novel that uses multiple narrators; Middlemarch is a complex love story that paints a detailed portrait of politics and class in late Victorian England; Jude the Obscure is the story of a working class man who, because he is poor, struggles all his life in pursuit of the university education he passionately desires; and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which tends to be a student favorite, is the story of a man whose portrait gets older with each terrible thing he does, while his own face stays as young as the day the portrait was painted. As interesting as this story is, the real interest of the novel is in the discussions of "aestheticism," the notion that beauty is more important than morality. In class lecture I will talk about the intellectual, cultural, and social conditions of late Victorian England that are relevant to understanding the novels in relation to their historical context. (Reading schedule will be posted later; for now, please ignore the "course summary" below.
You will write three essays of 4-6 pages. You will also have reading quizzes from time to time, to encourage you to keep up with the reading.