11:15a-12:30p MW (30) 3 cr.
TOPIC: HOUSE AND HOME: DOMESTICITY IN VICTORIAN FICTION
This course considers the history of the Victorian novel alongside
that of another great
institution, that of the British home. We will consider "home" as an
ideal and an object of
desire and fantasy in British fiction and culture: as an imaginative
construction. But we
will also look into the material history of the home and the house,
and think about the ways
the realities of Victorian architecture, social planning, gender
ideology, colonialism, and
class structure may have complicated or been at odds with the ideal or
fantasy of home. The
fictional Victorian homes we'll consider will range from the modest
and cozy (Wemmick's
miniature castle in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations) to
the impoverished (the
Manchester workers' homes in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton)
to the cursed, haunted,
and/or imposingly grand (Dickens's Satis House, Thornfield Hall in
Charlotte Brontė's
Jane Eyre, Emily Brontė's Wuthering Heights,
Grandcourt's estate in George
Eliot's Daniel Deronda). Poetry and essays by such authors as
Coventry Patmore,
Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, and Sarah Strickland Ellis will
provide additional
material for our investigation into the ideologies and representations
ofVictorian
domesticity. We will also consider the afterlife of the Victorian
novel's imagination of
home in a couple of twentieth-century texts: E.M. Forster's Howards
End and one work
of postcolonial fiction. Assignments will include two formal papers,
a number of shorter
response papers, and a midterm and final.