Courses

This seminar offers an intensive study of the later career of Charles Dickens, the most important of all English novelists.  We’ll focus on three of his long, multi-plot novels: David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend.  Although Dickens is best known as a comic novelist, in these later works the comedy is energized by somber and searching scrutiny of a wide social world, which Dickens engages through a host of innovative narrative techniques.  We’ll be asking why and how Dickens (like so many Victorian novelists) grounded his understanding of society in representations of domestic life and romantic desire, and how in those representations gender and sexuality become an especially powerful means of capturing social dynamics within structures of individual character.

For nearly a century these works have been a provocation to new modes and frames of reading: most recently, New Historicism, the politics of the family, queer theory, performance and theatricality, postcolonial criticism, the rise of “surface” reading, the history of affect, and ecocriticism.  We’ll draw on examples of these approaches (among others) in thinking through Dickensian configurations of domesticity and desire, as well as the distinctive formal structures of Dickensian character.