9:05a-9:55a MWF (30) 3 cr.

OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY. DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM BH 402.

This course offers a broad sweep through literature written in nineteenth- century Britain and the United States. Operating as a loose organizing principle for our reading will be the role of passion. What is passion? How is it represented in writing? What work does it do? What value does it have for different writers at different moments in the century? What are its connections to other major concerns of nineteenth-century readers: politics, money, social order, religion, sexuality, psychology? Though we will not be able to read all the important literature of this period, we will most probably consider works by Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickens, Douglass, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman, and Joyce. Class time will be divided between short lectures and group discussion.

Students will be asked to do several very short writing assignments and three papers, along with a final exam.