Victorian Relations

Victorian literature, as one of its leading critics writes, is concerned above all with “relationships and their representation.”  Relationships between individuals, groups, or nations are of course central to literature from all periods, but they figure with particular prominence in Victorian British writing, for two reasons.  First, the Victorian period follows an era that often fetishized the solitary individual: if Romantic writers frequently focused on figures in isolation, Victorian writers responded by panning out to consider human beings primarily in their social relations.  Second, the later nineteenth century witnessed revolutions in the conceptualization of relations between different classes, races, sexes, and species.  The new ideas were not limited to philosophers or scientists but permeated public discourse to an unprecedented extent.

In this course we will study a representative sampling of Victorian writing about relationships, possibly including such topics as relations between men and women, Britons and others nationalities, humans and animals, or past and present.  In addition we will consider the relation between different literary genres as we compare the way each topic is represented in fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose.