Instr:                  Jane Nardin, Professor
Office:               CRT 494,   229-6402
e-mail:                jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office hours:    W 10:30-11:30, and by appointment

Course Information:                    MWF  9:30     Curtin 124

Reading
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
John Wain, ed., Oxford Anthology of English Poetry (Vol. II)

Course Description

The nineteenth century 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. 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 hone our skills of literary analysis as we consider the ways in which some of the greatest nineteenth-century novelists and poets in England represented and responded to these developments.