Ackroyd, Peter. Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. St. Martin's Press, 2018. ISBN 9781250003652

Brontë Charlotte. Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Fourth Edition. Edited by Deborah Lutz, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company., 2016. ISBN 9780393264876

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. ISBN 9780393264234

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Second Edition. Edited by Bert G. Hornback. Norton Critical Edition W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.  ISBN 9780393974522

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Thomas Recchio. Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. ISBN 9780393930634

Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by Robert C. Schweik. Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. ISBN 9780393954081

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism. Edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie. Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ISBN 9780393696875

This course is an advanced study of selected Victorian Novels and their representation of the broader world of Victorian culture. The Victorian period was a time of working-class activism, increased recognition of the need for women's rights, industrialization, scientific discovery, and changing ideas about race. By examining how these novels both reflect and helped shape the time period, students will understand how these works engaged with the difficult age in which they were produced, and use contemporary literary theory and analysis to study the context and critical reaction to those works. 3 hours.

Upon successful completion of the course, each participant should be able to:

• analyze the Victorian Period in order to understand the multiple contexts for and pressures on literary production during that time;
• express their understanding of the relationship between literature and the historical/cultural contexts in which it was written, and their subsequent impact on modern literature;
• demonstrate an understanding of contemporary literary theory, including movements such as new historicism, cultural materialism, postcolonial criticism, feminism, reader-response criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and post-structuralism, among others;
• deploy ideas from works of criticism and theory in their own reading and writing;
• evaluate journal articles and professional studies of the Victorian Novel and Victorian period in order to be able to write in appropriate genres and modes for an audience of professional scholars, and
• demonstrate a fuller and deeper understanding of all the facets of the Victorian Novel and their relation to the past and present worlds.