This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

The Victorian period fascinates us in the twenty-first century, in part perhaps because we see something of the way we live now in an era marked on the one hand by profound social, political, and intellectual turmoil and on the other by inspirational creativity. This course explores the complex debates that arose in England as industrialisation changed utterly the socio-economic landscape at the same time as the new science undermined religious belief. We will read novelists, poets, thinkers, and commentators as we tease out three specific issues and their twenty-first-century afterlives: the rise of the Victorian City; religious faith and doubt; and the Woman Question. Our primary texts are Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam and A. S. Byatt's Neovictorian novella "The Conjugial Angel."