Newspapers, Magazines, and the Victorian Reading Public (West)

Capitalizing on MU’s outstanding collection of holdings in this area, this new graduate seminar will introduce students to some of the most important periodical magazines and newspapers of Victorian England, including the Cornhill Magazine, The Strand, All the Year Round, and The Illustrated London News. Leaf through the pages of these publications and you’ll see that they provide a fertile ground for learning about Victorian tastes in literature, art, politics, and science. The Victorian periodical is where Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning originally published their work. It is where essays appeared on a range of topics from "A Single Man’s Kitchen" (Cornhill, 1862) to "The Wonders of the Female Brain" (The Strand, 1891). And, in some cases, it is where advertisements for products like "Pear’s Soap" and "Beecham’s Pills" first attracted the eyes of Victorian consumers. Newspapers and magazines entail diverse materials by definition, and so works like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White did not appear as free-standing texts but as part of a lively exchange of texts within a single issue (and the larger domain of print culture). These texts, accordingly, might be seen as fundamentally intertextual and hybrid.

If one goal of the course is to discover the intertextual nature of the Victorian periodical, another is to study the dynamics of serial reading. Much of this course will thus focus on the Victorian serial (a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions). We will read in their original installments three novels (Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and The Woodlanders and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters) as well as numerous poems, essays, and short stories by such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle. What difference did it make that Victorians typically took two or more years to read a novel that we read in about two weeks? A major concern of this course is to examine how reading stories in parts, with pauses between reading periods dictated by publishing format, affected the ways in which Victorian readers first encountered the works of authors.

The Way They Never Were: Victorianism and Nostalgia (West)

The general purpose of this wide-ranging course is to examine the history of nostalgia as an idea through the lens of Victorian literature and culture.

Imagining Crime in Victorian Literature and Culture (West)

This course focuses on the Victorian crime novel and, more generally, on nineteenth-century British criminology and its relationship to, and its role as, a Victorian epistemological mode. This course seeks to explore the formation of criminology from a debased enterprise in the early nineteenth-century to one that captured the imagination and interest of late Victorian culture, including, and perhaps most notably, its fiction writers. The course will address a variety of questions that include the following: how did criminology as a "deductive" process develop in conjunction with crime as a subject of nineteenth-century genre fiction? how is criminology a type of narrative formation? what is the relationship between the division of nineteenth-century literature into genres and the development of criminological categories? Among the authors we will read are Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Elizabeth Braddon.

Reading the English Countryside in Poem, Novel and Painting

This course will have two overlapping goals.  First, we will look at the way the English countryside has been represented throughout the long nineteenth century and ask lots of questions about the ways these representations are working.  What larger projects do they advance? Which social issues are depicted, and which are ignored?  How does the English countryside shape the English child?  What must be occluded for the countryside to work as a repository for a writer/painter’s nostalgia?  Are there particular ways to see the countryside properly?  What are the costs that the landscape exacts from its viewers?  But secondly, and equally importantly, we will be asking questions about the nature of this interdisciplinary expedition.  What does it mean to read paintings in conjunction with poems and novels?  What works at cross-purposes in a multi-genre study, and what gives such a study results greater than the sum of its parts?  Can literary and visual texts be set in dialogue with each other at all?  And what of works that combine pictures with text?  Authors to be considered include Wordsworth, Clare, Hardy, and Eliot; artists include Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner.

Reading Empire, Seeing the Other

In this course, we will be reading poems and novels and looking at art both high and low produced as representation of, or reaction to, the expanding British empire, an expanse upon which, famously, the sun never set.  We will first look at early representations of the “other” through some works of Romantic Orientalism, then move to works that read these “others” as part of the expanding British imperium.  As we proceed we will be asking lots of questions:  how do these works of literature and art shape British perceptions of the world around them; equally importantly, how do these works shape British perceptions of themselves?  What are the differences and similarities between written accounts of British empire and other kinds of representations (painted, photographic, etc.)?  How do these works reflect the changing dynamics of the British empire as the century progresses?  Are they only telling a story of domination and mastery, or are counter-narratives introduced?  Authors to be considered include Byron, Austen, Brontë, Collins, Dickens, Haggard, Schreiner.

Victorian Literature and the Visual Arts (West)

This course focuses on literature’s relationship to the visual arts during the Victorian period. Writers in this course include Charlotte and Anne Bronte, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Christina and Dante Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Special topics include “Theorizing Art’s Value for the Victorian Age: the Writings of John Ruskin;” “Victorian Poetry, Painting, and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement;” “Victorian Women Writers, the Visual Arts, and the Sexual Politics of Representation;” “Victorian Writers, Illustrators, and the Rise of Visual Literacy;” and Decadence, Bohemianism, and the Fin-de-Siecle.”

Victorians and the Limit of the Human

A course examining some foundational texts of Victorian “science fiction,” with particular emphasis on the era’s fraught understanding of the nature of the human.  Using Darwin, Huxley, Tylor and Galton as a starting point, the course will read such classic works as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula, and Wells’ The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Moreau against contemporary theorists such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.  The intent is not only to examine the formative moments in a now-capacious genre, but also to the Victorian ontological condition. 

Victorians Past, Present, and Future

In this course we will read a wide range of Victorian literature in pursuit of Victorian ideas of time and history.  First, we will study texts that take the past as their subject, whether mythical, like Tennyson’s poetry of the Arthurian age or scientific, like Darwin’s theory of evolution, and we will ask how these treatments of history shape our understanding of the Victorian present.  What of the past did Victorian writers seek most urgently to preserve, and why?  What can we learn from their choice of era, whether recent past (Middlemarch) or times long ago?  When Victorians write their histories through their autobiographies, what can these personal narratives tell us of the spirit of the age?  Next, we will turn to writings that seek to explicate the current “condition of England” by foregrounding its changing nature.  While it is the nature of the Victorian present that we will always be concerned with, we will also seek in these contemporary narratives a continuing sense of the powerful presence of the past.  The final weeks of the course will be concerned with the Victorian idea of the future.  We will read two very different accounts of time travel—Wells’ The Time Machine and Morris’ News from Nowhere -- that will both bring us back to where we began, asking questions about how the texts we read can illuminate both Victorian times and the times we live in today.