Victorian writers and intellectuals were profoundly conscious of themselves as living in a distinctive age. Materially, the combination of the Industrial Revolution and colonial holdings created vast wealth-with its accompanying conspicuous consumption and nouveau-riche "vulgarity"-side by side with a depth and scale of poverty and human suffering never seen before. Socially and intellectually, many saw it as an "age of transition": as John Stuart Mill put it, "Mankind have outgrown old superstitions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones." Responses ranged from nostalgic depression (Matthew Arnold sadly "Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other powerless to be born") to exuberant optimism (Elizabeth Barrett Browning celebrating "this live, throbbing age/That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires/And spends more passion, more heroic heat/Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing rooms/Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles"), but nearly all took extremely seriously their roles as critics and conceptual architects of a new world. This course will examine Victorian literary culture in its broader social context, looking at the ways writers engaged with constructions of class, nationality, gender, and the role of the artist and intellectual within society, and tracing the shift from High Victorian earnestness to the Late Victorian "aesthetic" reaction against it. Primary attention will be on poetry and non-fiction prose, together with a few short novels and plays, by such writers as Arnold, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Mill, Walter Pater, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde. This course will be taught by a mixture of lecture and discussion, punctuated by an occasional slide show. Format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: three short papers and a final exam. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: about 20). (1700-1900)