What is the Victorian novel if not over-crowded? Its pages teem with people, characters both major and minor, as well as those who seem to be simply extras, jamming the streets and making their usual uproar just outside the center of action. And all of them are crammed into some space we understand as the world of the novel. This heavily populated literary form has a geographic analogue in London, Europe's first city of one million people. For many in Victorian Britain the world seemed increasingly crowded, populated with people unknown. This course is about strangers and crowded worlds, as well as the varied literary and cultural responses to a society characterized by frequent encounters with anonymous others. We'll discover the pleasures and perils posed by the Victorian city, alive with unknown people and exhilarating crowds, and think about questions raised by life among the strangers who constitute any community, from towns to nations. How does it feel to live in a peopled world, for example, one in which the presence of others might be felt as much as a problem as a pleasure What strategies-psychological, social, aesthetic, even romantic-evolve to cope with such a world? We'll spend some time thinking through newly central categories of experience, such as anonymity and solitude, as they're registered in a variety of texts. We'll ask whether anonymity is a relegated subjectivity or a privileged model of identity. What does it mean that Victorian prostitutes were called Anonyma? Does anonymity have a gender? A class? We'll consider how texts contend with strangers and anonymity at the formal level, asking if the Victorian novel's weirdly disembodied but ubiquitous omniscient narrator, for example, routinizes anonymity. We'll also examine strategies of solitude in a crowded world, moments in which some, unable to take on the mantle of anonymity, attempt other types of escape from society through self-absenting acts like reading in public or daydreaming. Readings likely to include: Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Dickens, Bleak House; Eliot, Daniel Deronda; Oscar Wilde; Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde; Conrad, The Secret Agent; various social theorists. Format: seminar/discussion. Requirements: 2 essays, one shorter and one longer, totaling 15-20 pages, class attendance and participation. Prerequisite: 100-level English course or permission of the instructor. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference to English majors. (1700-1900)

Hour: MCWEENY