ENGL 331 - Nineteenth-Century British Novel

An advanced course on the novel, considering developments in the form including realism, sensationalism, the domestic novel, the adventure romance, the detective tale, the marriage plot, the social problem novel, and the gothic. Questions of genre and form will be considered, as well as the social and political circumstances that individual novels address: the expansion of empire, codification of gender ideology, hierarchies of power, relationship of humans to the environment, global politics, religious crises, family structures, labor markets, and technologies of travel and communication. Novelists may include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde. Secondary readings include literary scholarship and additional nineteenth-century documents for cultural contexts, including works by more marginalized voices. Particular themes vary. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course. Alternate years. (4 Credits)