Literature Pre-1850 Fall 2025
ENGL 334: Jane Austen & Thomas Hardy
Instructor: Philip Wedge
26522 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4023
This course offers the opportunity to study two major 19th century British authors, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, who helped shape the novel as a form. We will read three major novels from each author and study the issues they explore, from the roles of women in society, to social class issues, to the evolution and potential demise of rural life; from modes of genteel courtship to the struggle to rise out of the laboring class. In the process we will also examine the evolution of the novel as a form from 3-volume edition to serialization and beyond. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays (60%) and a comprehensive Final Exam (25%). Homework (15%) includes pop quizzes and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion; Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
ENGL 521: Epic: Heroes, Gods, & Rebels
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
25866 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 1009
Epic has lain at the heart of the European literary tradition for twenty-seven hundred years. The most prestigious and the most ambitious of literary genres, epic explores human nature, promotes and questions political ideals and social principles, defines nations and communities, and examines the nature of heroism. Through stories of human heroism and super-human adventures, epic poems ask what it means to be human, how to find meaning in mortality, and how to live within—or overturn—power structures and the rulers who manipulate them. Epic endures because it offers its readers tools for living. In this class, we will encounter four of the greatest European epic poems, culminating in the greatest English epic: Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
ENGL 590: Black Bodies in British Literature
Instructor: Zay Dale
27666 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 1003
This course examines how Black bodies are represented and understood in British literature from their early presence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to their presence in the twentieth century. We will explore how the physicality of Blackness shapes and challenges the British literary tradition by raising important questions about race, culture, identity, and social-political exclusions tied to Black bodies. Half of our class takes place pre-1850s to analyze how Black bodies disrupt the existing social and cultural order of British identity. We will study Blackness as both a racial category and as a cultural rupture of the traditional boundaries of subjectivity. This class will then move to Modernism to focus on how Black bodies and Blackness continue to challenge and reshape British literature. By analyzing these two moments, this course examines how Black bodies and Blackness inform and transform British literary aesthetics. The final research paper for this course will involve analyzing literary, archival, and historical texts to explore new perspectives on the role of Black bodies in British literature from the sixteenth century to the Modernist era.
ENGL 655: Victorian Fantasy
Instructor: Anna Neill
26555 | By appointment | Online
The Victorians invented fantasy. They recovered and rewrote folk tales and medieval stories. They reenchanted weary modern lives with tales of fairies and goblins. They imagined marvelous new lands whose indigenous peoples could be brutally conquered. They mixed magical thinking with evolutionary science to create improbable beings or to predict outlandish planetary futures. And they imagined utopian possibilities that drew on the conventions of romance. Over the semester we will read a wide range of fantastic Victorian stories, considering how they reflect and comment on contemporary science, industrial capitalism, imperialism, and the many cultural upheavals caused by revolutions in technology and commerce. These writers are the precursors of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. If you love these 20th-century fantasy classics, you will enjoy learning about the stories, the histories, and the conflicted visions of past present and future worlds that the Victorians tried to navigate with the help of romance, myth, and magic. Texts: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies; George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin; Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds;; H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; William Morris, News from Nowhere.
