Nineteenth-Century Studies
Term 2
Distance Education
This course offers the student the opportunity to encounter and engage with the works of some of the most successful writers of the Victorian period, and to be exposed to some of that period’s central concerns: gender, class, religion and art. These subjects were at the centre of heated tension, so that much of the discourse about them – by politicians, clerics, scientists, novelists and essayists, among others – takes the form of oppositions and power struggles. These basic concerns can be then connected to larger issues of empire, industrialism, individualism, private and public domains, domesticity, religious doubt, decadence, and aestheticism, as seen in a variety of genres. Jane Eyre and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will represent gothic fiction, including the sub-genres of epistolary and sensation fiction; Hard Times will represent the ‘condition of England’/industrial novel; Tess of the d’Urbervilles will represent the pastoral and ‘fallen woman’ novel; and The Picture of Dorian Gray will represent the aesthetic novel. Each novel’s thematic concerns and genre are closely connected with the concerns of at least one other novel in the course. Each novel will be read not only in the context of the socio-political and critical concerns of its own period, but also of modern scholarly approaches to it. Please click here for a fuller description of the course, its texts, and its requirements.
This section of ENGL 364A is offered through Distance Education. The description for this course can be found here.
