ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GNCS 255) Readings vary but include novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Topic for 2024/25b: Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Henry James referred to large, sprawling, multiplot three-volume Victorian novels as “loose baggy monsters.” This class investigates his claim by focusing on the ways nineteenth-century British novels explored scale and scope in unique ways. We focus on three particularly noteworthy, “classic” novels: Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. All three novels are considered major works of the realist tradition–though they also have influences of other Victorian genres, including bildungsroman, Gothic, mystery, sensation fiction, and the marriage plot. They all directly deal with questions of scale and scope: each balances focusing on the interior psychology and development of individual protagonists with wide, sweeping tales of an entire city or county featuring hundreds of characters and subplots. In devoting an entire semester to these three novels, we spend time closely reading them and paying special attention to all they reveal about the development and trajectory of the novel as a literary form. We also probe the texts’ engagement with a wide array of topical themes, including disability, gender, sexuality, marriage and divorce, religion, race, class, capitalism, sex work, sexual assault, colonialism, war, aging, government reform, crime and policing, contagion, political representation, medical advancements, financial speculation, blackmail, and legal scandals. Christian Lewis.

This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS