Instr:                 Jane Nardin
Office:              CRT 494,     229-6402
e-mail:              jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:          TR   8:05-9:20         GAR  304

Reading:

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Reading packet of selected poetry and essays by Victorian writers

Course Description

The Victorian era was marked by rapid social and intellectual change. Industrialization offered many new ways in which a
man could grow rich by his own efforts. Realizing this, women began to demand more opportunities to work outside the home.
They also demanded legal equality with men. Industrialization upset Britain's stable system of class distinctions, as well as its
stable system of gender roles. Social climbing was rampant. Shady get-rich-quick schemes grew in popularity. The aristocracy
closed ranks to resist middle class attempts to curtail or invade its privileges. As the scientific approach to knowledge achieved
significant triumphs, faith in religious explanations of the universe declined. Many people feared that morality might be
disappearing along with religion–and these fears
sometimes bordered upon hysteria.

In this course, we will focus our attention upon the ways in which Victorian novelists, poets, and essayists responded to
changes in the position of women, to changes in the class system, and to the decline of religion. In addition to the four great
novels listed above, we will be reading such works as John Ruskin's famous anti-feminist essay, "Of Queens' Gardens,"
selections from J. S. Mill's equally famous pro-feminist tract, "On the Subjection of Women," Arthur Clough's comic poem
about Victorian hypocrisy, "The Latest Decalogue," and Matthew Arnold's eloquent poetic lament for a lost religious faith,
"Dover Beach."