Courses

On a frosty day in February 1841, fervent American readers swarmed the piers of New York Harbor, frantically calling out to British sailors aboard a ship carrying the most recent installment of a Dickens novel, “Is Little Nell dead??!!” Such was the Victorian Novel: a transatlantic public sensation. This course will trace the development of the novel during its most formative period, mapping its central concerns (self, community, love, gender, family, race, nation, empire) on a conceptual grid where representational strategies (realism, romanticism, historicism, melodrama, serialization) intersect with cultural thinking about poverty, work, faith, care, social justice, and globalism.