(Major Field) Victorian Literature

RATIONALE My major field is designed to foster a comprehensive sense of the artistic and sociocultural concerns that shaped and were shaped by English literature in the 191' century. To this end, I have divided my reading into two parts: The Victorian Novel and Later Victorian Literature: Aesthetics and Decadence. Clearly, there will be significant (and intentional) overlap in looking at the trajectory of the novel side by side with that of poetry. Both genres, for example, discuss the role of the artist in society whether it be Trollope's claim that a novel should "instruct in morals while it amuses" or Whistler's rebuttal that art is "selfishly occupied with her own perfection only having no desire to teach." Both genres also play with forms of narration, from Browning's development of the dramatic monologue or numerous perspectives in The Ring and the Book to Wilkie Collins' use of several narrators in Woman in White. However, while The Ring and the Book undermines the idea of ultimate "truth" by showing various versions of one event, Woman in White at least seems to claim authority through multiple narrative "documents." Such works are not alone in raising the central issue of art's relationship to truth or, to put it another way, of Realism and reality in Victorian literature. Ideas of Realism (especially of what J. Hillis Miller has termed "moralistic realism") are among those that I will be considering in my Novel section. I have chosen novels that span the century and fall into the major, if elastic, novelistic categories: the social problem novel, the provincial novel, the urban novel, the novel of manners, the sensation novel, the detective novel, the horror novel. As these categories suggest, the 19th century witnessed the development of a variety of narrative approaches in the attempt to depict, even solve, social and cultural dilemmas. Yet for all of their carefully plotted marriages and routinely "happy" endings, 19th-century novels so often seem to close unsatisfactorily; they show the "seams" (as Barthes would say) in their solutions. (Jane Eyre's fairy tale end, with its disturbingly isolated, maimed vision of happiness, and Sense and Sensibility's enforcement of Marriane's marriage to Colonel Brandon are two fitting examples.) What is it about the Victorian novel-- and the culture it responds to--that accounts for these frustrated attempts at closure? My second sub-field works with similar ideas, tracing notions of aesthetics from Browning through Hopkins. In particular, I will examine the increasingly obvious tension between art and morality, a tension addressed most explicitly, albeit from different perspectives, by John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Picking up where Pater cautiously left off, fin-de-siècle writers began to reject the pieties and conventions of what we typically consider "Victorian" literature. Hence we get both Wilde's cutting, playful sarcasm and Swinburne's mixture of the erotic with the morbid. Questions that interest me include: what exactly is "decadence"? To what extent is decadence a rebellion vs. a culmination of already existing aesthetic approaches, such as Pre-Raphaelitism? Looking forward, what kind of continuity is there between the literature at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century? In particular, how did Victorian poetry and cultural criticism lay the foundation for the Modernist writers who famously, if at times unconvincingly, rejected their Victorian inheritance?

I. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Austen — Sense and Sensibility (1811) — Pride and Prejudice (1813) — Emma (1816) M. Shelley — Frankenstein (1818) C. Bronte — Jane Eyre (1847) — Villette (1853) E. Bronte — Wuthering Heights (1847) Dickens — Oliver Twist (1838) — Barnaby Rudge (1841) — David Copperfield (1849) — Great Expectations (1860-1) Thackeray — Vanity Fair (1848) Gaskell — North and South (1855) — Cranford (1853) Trollope — The Warden (1855) — Barchester Towers (1857) Collins — The Woman in White (1860) Eliot — The Mill on the Floss (1860) — Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) — Middlemarch (1872) Hardy — Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) — Jude the Obscure (1895) Stevenson — The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (1886) Doyle — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) Stoker — Dracula (1897) CRITICISM Nancy Armstrong — Desire and Domestic Fiction Gillian Beer — Darwin's Plots Peter Brooks — Reading for the Plot Gerard Genette — Narrative Discourse Rene Girard — Deceit, Desire & the Novel George Levine — The Realistic Imagination Georg Lukacs — Theory of the Novel D.A. Miller — Narrative and its Discontents — The Novel and the Police

II. LATER VICTORIAN LITERATURE: AESTHETICS AND DECADENCE Browning — "My Last Duchess"; "Porphyria's Lover"; "The Englishman in Italy"; "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"; "Fra Lippo Lippi"; "Andrea Del Sarto" (1842-1855) — The Ring and the Book (1869) D.G. Rossetti — "The Blessed Damozel"; "The Portrait"; "Mary's Girlhood"; "The Woodspurge" (1847-56) — Selected sonnets from The House of Life (1848-81) C. Rossetti — "Song"; "The P.R.B."; "Paradise"; "In an Artist's Studio"; "A Birthday"; "A Better Resurrection"; "Goblin Market"; "The Thread of Life"; "Sleeping at Last" (1848-c.1893) Ruskin — Stones of Venice (1851-3) — Selections from Modern Painters, vols. I-V (1843-60) Arnold — "On the Modern Element in Literature" (1857) — Culture & Anarchy (1869) Pater — The Renaissance (1873) — "The Child in the House" (1878) — Marius the Epicurean (1885) — "Denys L'Auxerrois" from Imaginary Portraits (1887) — "Aesthetic Poetry," "Style," "Romanticism" from Appreciations (1889) Swinburne — "The Leper"; "The Garden of Proserpine"; "Before the Mirror"; "A Forsaken Garden"; "A Ballad of Dreamland"; "Sonnet for a Picture" (c.1866-1880) Hopkins — "God's Grandeur"; "Spring"; "The Windhover"; "Pied Beauty"; "The Handsome Heart"; "Spring and Fall"; "To What Serves Mortal Beauty?"; "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves"; The "Terrible Sonnets"; "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" (c.1876-89) Huysman — Against the Grain (1884) Whistler — "The Ten O'Clock Lecture" (1885) Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) — "The Truth in Masks," "The Decay of Lying," from Intentions (1891) Symonds — Introduction and selected chapters from The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) CRITICISM Jerome Buckley — The Triumph of Time: A study in the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence Carol T. Christ — The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry Richard Dellamora — Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism Robert Langbaum — The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition F.R. Leavis — New Bearings in English Poetry J. Hillis Miller — Victorian Subjects R.K. Thornton — "Hopkins: Aesthete or Moralist?" David Weir — Decadence and the Making of Modernism