Victorian Literature

This course examines nineteenth-century British poetry and prose works in cultural and historical context. Renowned for its proliferation of the novel, this period also saw a tremendous outpouring of creative energy in poetry and nonfiction prose, as writers confronted the rise of industry, the widening of democratic representation, the expansion of empire, the emergence of the New Woman, and the birth of the Aesthete. Authors to be studied may include Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Eliot, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Ruskin, Morris, Pater, Wilde, and Field, among others.