L645  27088  MARSH (#4)
English Fiction 1800-1900

2:30p– 3:45p TR

L645 cuts several swathes through the rich field of nineteenth-
century fiction, highlighting such issues and subjects as: Romantic
inheritances; the "birth" of the Victorian novel; women's writing &
New Woman fiction; writing as a profession; censorship and
offensiveness; "industrial" fiction; the "Newgate" novel;
serialization and the novel market; "sensation"
fiction"; "decadence" and the fin de siecle; Victorian realism(s);
loss of faith; "Darwinian" narrative; the Victorian bestseller;
fiction and illustration; fiction of/and Empire; and theatrical and
cinematic adaptation.  Main texts: Shelley, Frankenstein; Ainsworth,
Jack Sheppard; Gaskell, North and South; Eliot, Adam Bede; Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities; Collins, The Woman in White; Haggard, She;
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Gissing, New Grub Street; Grand,
The Heavenly Twins.  We will aim to cover a limited amount of
essential secondary reading (such critics as Levine, Beer,
Armstrong, Green-Lewis, Brantlinger, Showalter, and Arata), and--
according to individual interests--each to delve into and orally to
report on particular “conversation” texts (that is, significant
contextualizing or inter-texts), which will include: Godwin, Caleb
Williams; Polidori, “The Vampyre”; Stoker, Dracula; Du Maurier,
Trilby; Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Beach at Falesa;
Dickens, Oliver Twist; The Newgate Calendar; government & periodical
reports on factory conditions; Ward, Robert Elsmere; Braddon, Lady
Audley's Secret; Moore, Esther Waters & Literature at Nurse; Linton,
The Autobigraphy of Christopher Kirkland; Schreiner, The Story of an
African Farm; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Corelli, The Sorrows of
Satan; Pater, Marius the Epicurean; and the transcript of Oscar
Wilde's 1895 trials.  Several sessions of this class will meet in
the Lilly Library, to facilitate access to archival and primary
materials.  Weekly discussion questions; oral reports on secondary
and “conversation” reading.  The primary writing requirement for
this course may be fulfilled either by an annotated bibliography (or
similar research project), or by an open-book final exam, or (if
inspiration strikes) by a formal paper (in the format of an essay, a
critical article, or a review essay).