ENL 3251: Victorian Literature

Course Description:

This course will seek to define the contours of Victorian literature - its obsessions, tensions, particulars, and world views. Since literature reveals the workings of culture, we shall endeavor to create an ongoing conversation on the nature of those workings as we piece together the conversation in which the work itself participates through both in-class discussions and weekly written responses. We will focus on a number of issues that were vitally important to the Victorians and continue to be debated in our own time such as the Woman Question, class conflicts, Crisis of Faith, and degeneracy/decadence.

The class takes as its organizing text Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Though this text is from the twentieth century rather the nineteenth, it provides a useful framework to examine the Victorian issues mentioned above. In the course of the term, we will read all of the major text from which Moore has taken his main characters and explore in depth how each represents particular Victorian obsessions.

The final project will be a group project in which you will construct a fictional narrative featuring a character from Victorian literature. You will then proved an 8-10 page interpretation and discussion of the Victorian characters, styles, and discourses that you have utilized in your narrative. Each group member will also provide an anonymous review of how the group functioned so that I will know if any groups members have not done their share of the work.

The goal of this course is to encourage an understanding of each individual work within the larger context of English literature and, by doing so, learn how to read poetry, drama, and fiction critically. In order to communicate these interpretations, we will also focus on how to write about literature. Thus the goal in this endeavor is to construct essays that discuss these genres in a thoughtful, convincing, and effective manner.