Syllabus for English 73: Victorian Literature -- Fantasy, Novel, Poetry, Nonfiction (1996)

Professor Landow (office: 209 Horace-Mann; office hours: 1-2, Tuesday and Thursday, and 2-4, Wednesdays). Class meets 10:30-12:00, Tuesday, Thursday; with an occasional hypertext lab -- 2 pr 3 a semester -- in 265 CIT Wednesdays 7- 8 PM.

Week 1 (3 through 10 September). Romantic Visions of Self and Society -- Fictional Autobiography and the Bildungsroman -- Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre (1847). Consult relevant sections of the Victorian Web.

Exercise 1 (Getting-acquainted-with-WWW assignment) due Monday, 9 September.)

Weeks 2 and 3 (12 through 19 September). Alfred Lord Tennyson -- Romantic to Victorian; or The Poet and Society.

"The Kraken" (1830), "Mariana," "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Lady of Shalott," "The Two Voices," "Oenone," "The Palace of Art," "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind," "The Lotos Eaters," "Ulysses," "Tithonus," "Locksley Hall," "Break, Break, Break," "Lucretius," "The Voyage of Maeldune," "Tears, Idle Tears," "Crossing the Bar," Selections from In Memoriam (1850)

Weeks 4 and 5 (24 September through 3 October). Fantasy or Realism -- Charles Dickens as Early Victorian

Pickwick Papers.

Major exercise due Friday, 25 October. [Follow for assignment. (1995 version with student essays).]

Week 6 and 7 (8 through 17 October). Realism in Fiction: The Industrial Novel -- Elizabeth Gaskell

North and South (1855)

Weeks 8 and 9 (22 through 31 October) Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Novel-Poem.

Aurora Leigh (1856)

Week 10 (5 and 7 November). Past and Present in Robert Browning -- Fantasy or Realism?

"My Last Duchess," "Count Gismond," "Incident of the French Camp," "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," "Porphyria's Lover," "Pictor Ignotus," "The Lost Leader," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "The Laboratory," "Love Among the Ruins," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Caliban upon Setebos," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "An Epistle," "Any Wife to Any Husband," "Saul," "Cleon."

Week 11. (12 and 14 November). The Victorian Sage -- John Ruskin

Unto This Last (1860), "Traffic" (1866), and other writings.

Weeks 12 and 13. (19 through 26 November). Pre-Raphaelite Fantasy and Realism -- Christina and Dante Rossetti; William Morris

All selections in anthology.

Week 14 (3 and 5 December) Realism as Fantasy -- Anthony Trollope

The Warden (1875)

Week 15 (10 December) Late Victorian Fantastic Visions of Self and Society-- Lewis Carroll

Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).

Final assignment due day of examinations for courses in this class hour (listed in college catalogue).

Last modified 1996