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Description:
This course will introduce students to a wide
range of poetry written during the Victorian period,
as well as to social and intellectual concerns that define and preoccupy these
works. We will explore poetry written by men, by women, and by members of
different classes, and will closely consider issues such as genre, poetic
language, meter, audience, and the relationship between poetry, the visual
arts, social change, and crises of faith. Selected works of nonfiction
and criticism will deepen our understanding of the formal and historical
aspects of these texts, especially as they correspond with Victorian debates
surrounding religious belief, anxieties of empire and class, the social role
of women, different forms of experience, a mythic past, and an insistently
modern present.
Week 1: Medievalism, Myth, and the
Past
Alfred Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott," "Idylls of the King"
(excerpts)
John Ruskin, "The Nature of
Gothic" (selections)
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present
(selections)
(Images of Shalott:
William Holman Hunt, John William Waterhouse)
Week 2: Women and Lovers
Robert Browning, "Porphyria's Lover"
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
"The Blessed Damozel,"
"Jenny"
Christina Rossetti,
"In an Artist's Studio"
Buchanan, "The Fleshly School of
Poetry"
(Paintings: Hunt, "The
Awakening Conscience"; Rossetti,
"The Blessed Damozel,")
Week 3: Faith and Fallenness
Christina Rossetti,
Goblin Market, "Cousin Kate"
Week 4: Fallenness
II
Augusta Webster, "A
Castaway"
Thomas Hardy, "A Ruined
Maid"
Amy Levy, "Magdalen"
J. Arthur Munby,
"The Serving Maid"
John Ruskin, "Of Queen's
Gardens"
Week 5: The Woman Question and
Narrative Poetry
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "To
George Sand: A Desire,"
"To George Sand: A
Recognition," excerpts from Aurora Leigh
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra
(selections)
Week 6: Empire, Ambition, and
Patriotism
Alfred Tennyson, "The Lotos-Eaters," "Ulysses," "Charge of
the Light Brigade"
Felicia Hemans,
"Casabianca," "Properzia
Rossi," "Woman on the Field of Battle"
Rudyard Kipling, "The
Ladies"
Week 7: Victorian Culture Wars and
the Evolutionary Hypothesis
Robert Browning, "Caliban upon Setebos"
Alfred Tennyson, "The Kraken,"
In Memoriam (selections)
Matthew Arnold, "Literature and
Science" (selections)
Thomas Huxley, "Science and
Culture" (selections)
Week 8: Melancholy and Crises of
Faith
Matthew Arnold, "Isolation.
To Marguerite," "To Marguerite: Continued,"
"Dover Beach,"
"Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse"
Arthur Hugh Clough, "Is it true, ye
Gods who treat us"
Arnold, "Preface to
Poems"
Week 9: Poetry of Sympathy and Social
Reform
Thomas Hood, "The Bridge of
Sighs," "The Song of the Shirt"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "The
Cry of the Children,"
"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's
Point," "A Curse for a Nation"
Frederick Engels,
The Condition of the English Working Class (selections)
Week 10: Working-class Poetry
Ellen Johnston, "A Thousand Times
I'd be a Factory Girl"
Selections from Samuel Bamford, Janet Hamilton
Compare to: Matthew Arnold,
"Lines Written in Kensington Gardens"
Week 11: Crises of Faith II
G. M. Hopkins, "God's
Grandeur," "The Windhover,"
"Carrion Comfort,"
"No Worse, There is None"
Thomas Hardy, "Hap," "The
Darkling Thrush"
Week 12: Decadence and
Aestheticism
A. C. Swinburne,
"The Garden of Prosperine," "The
Lake of Gaube"
Michael Field,
"Cyclamens"
Oscar Wilde, "The Sphinx,"
"The Critic as Artist"
Walter Pater, "Conclusion,"
from The Renaissance
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