The Victorian era might seem shrouded in the fog of history, an only dimly seen world of repressed sexuality and stiff manners. Much of that fog, however, turns out to be pollution produced by the factories that sprang up seemingly everywhere during Britain's industrialization in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Victorians, with their noisy, crowded cities and burgeoning mass entertainment industry in the form of the novel, Great Exhibitions, and moving panoramic pictures, are much closer to our own foggy world than we might think. This course will introduce students to some of the major works and concerns of that huge portion of the nineteenth century over which Queen Victoria reigned, concerns that continue to occupy us long after her death: like sex, money, celebrity, work and death. Although the (very) long novel is the signal literary achievement of the era, we'll also read poetry and other types of prose to gain a sense of the century's enormous variety of literary production. Among our concerns will be the rise of commodity culture (shopping as we know it was invented by the Victorians); the efforts, and dramatic failures, of literary forms to secure the distinction between the private realm of the home and the public world of work; the novel's part in the formation of Britain's vast empire; and the response of literary works to life in cities such as London. We'll pay attention to how these works transform stories of getting and spending (i.e. the pursuit of economic interests) into dramas of romantic desire (and vice versa), and how they work both to uphold and overturn the social arrangements of gender, class, sexuality and race in nineteenth-century England. Because so many of the stories told by these works are as familiar to us as everyday life-in fact, are crucial to the construction of what we now know as everyday life-we'll also work hard to maintain what's strange and specific to the nineteenth century about these works even as we glimpse our own world's fun-house mirror reflection in them. Likely authors to be studied include Austen Bronte, Dickens, Arnold, Swinburne, Eliot, Wilde, and Hardy. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: two essays, one shorter and one longer totaling 15-20 pages, short weekly writing assignments, regular attendance, and active participation in class discussions. Prerequisite: 100-level English course or permission of the instructor. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference to English majors. (1700-1900)

Hour: MCWEENY