Florence Boos

This course will trace the development of major issues, motifs, genres, and artistic preoccupations in British literature of the fin de siècle and the period directly preceding the first “world war.” In the process, we will give attention to late-Victorian poetics, early stirrings of what critics came to call “modernism,” and new forms of social criticism, utopian literature and working-class cultural expression. We will also view a number of Victorian paintings and designs, and examine Kelmscott and other fine press books and illustrations.

I will ask students registered in the course to submit weekly web postings, and prepare a 20 page critical paper or two shorter ones.

Fiction and the Social World:

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda;
George Gissing, New Grub Street;
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure;
Dorothy Richardson, The Pilgrimage (2 books).

Art, Romance, and Vision:

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean;
William Morris, “True and False Society,” “The Society of the Future,” News from Nowhere;
Vernon Lee, Supernatural Tales;
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey; and
essays by Frances Power Cobbe, Friedrich Engels, Mona Caird, Oscar Wilde, Jane Clapperton, Arthur Symons and others.

Poetry:

Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Fields, Mary Coleridge, Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, W. E. Henley, Rosamund Marriot Watson, A. E. Housman, Lionel Johnson, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, Marion Angus, and Violet Jacob.

Ordinary Life:

Working-class memoirs, including The Christian Watt Papers, and Celtic songs from Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica.

Short Fiction:

Stories and novellas by Margaret Oliphant, George Egerton, Olive Schreiner, Flora Steele, Rudyard Kipling, Violet Jacob, and Neil Gunn.