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English 244: Literature of the Victorian Period
The Victorian period (roughly 1830-1900) is often seen as repressive, thoughtlessly nationalistic, stodgy, choked in chintz. But many of the greatest poetic works of the period give voice to such emotional and social extremes as deviant sexuality, blasphemy, criminality, political subversiveness, and even--one of the period's more scandalous ideas--the possibility of higher education for women. We'll begin the semester by following Lewis Carroll's Alice down into Wonderland, an underworld that will introduce a range of issues regarding the Victorian period. We'll end with a twentieth-century representation of the Victorians, probably A.S. Byatt's Possession, which will help us survey the complexities of contemporary readers encountering Victorian poets and their world. In between, we'll explore a number of the major poetic works of the period, moving from the intense lyricism of Alfred Tennyson (called by one critic "the most discreetly erotic poet in the language"), to the vibrant voices of Robert Browning, to the dignified Matthew Arnold. We'll also study a range of works by other significant poets of the period, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, and Gerald Manley Hopkins. Essays by J.S. Mill, Arnold, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and others will help to establish some of the cultural and intellectual contexts for our reading of the poetry in Victorian society. Some attention will be given to the period's rich visual representations (paintings, photographs, prints) of many of the poems we read.
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While the class will explore many aspects of Victorian poetry, we'll pay special attention to what Victorians termed "The Women Question." We'll work with essays by Harriet Martineau and others on the place of women in this rapidly changing society, and also closely track these shifts in the roles imagined for women in the period's literature. The class will move, for example, from Tennyson's controversial early representations of anguished female subjectivity to his still more controversial exploration of the radical idea of women's higher education in his poem The Princess. We'll also explore alternative narratives of artistic and social emancipation for women, as well as the poetic treatment of such topics as prostitution and child labor. We'll read a selection of works by the many, highly diversified women poets who came to flourish in Victorian England, which have only recently again become available (these poets include Amy Levy, Augusta Webster and the lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who published their haunting poetry jointly under the name of "Michael Field"). The Victorians debated heatedly, sometimes ferociously, about the poets and the work they produced so copiously. They also reveled in the distinctive pleasures poetry offers--its rhythms, cadences, rhetorical complexities. In entering this spirit, we'll attend throughout the semester to the dynamics of reading poetry aloud (a great Victorian pastime). We'll also experiment with memorizing one or two short poems, pursuing the rewards of acquiring some poems (and skills) to live with long after we end the term. Classes will be a mixture of lecture, discussion and group work. Requirements include active class participation, two medium-length papers, and a final examination. Prerequisite: a college course in literature, or permission of the instructor.  |