ENGL 640: 19th-Century British Literature

Fall 2008
Professor Rosemary Jann
Mondays 4:30-7:10

Course Preview

British Literature 1880-1915
Literary historians use the term "the long nineteenth century" in part to indicate the extension of Victorian concerns and attitudes up to the First World War. This course will examine significant developments in the literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Late Victorian fantasy and adventure fiction will provide glimpses of encounters with the colonial and class "others." We will also consider the challenges mounted against the moral aesthetic of mainstream Victorian literature by the art-for-art's-sake movement, centered on Oscar Wilde and other self-proclaimed aesthetes; anxieties about how the feminist principles of the "new woman" unsettled gender stereotypes; and the ways the incursion of new money unsettled the Victorian class system. Authors covered will probably include Wilde, Wells, Kipling, Stevenson, Gissing, Shaw, Galsworthy, and Forster. Send questions to rjann@gmu.edu.

Books Ordered
Note that those marked with asterisks represent a required edition, since these include supplemental texts that you won't be able to get in another form. For the other texts, you may use alternative editions, although doing so might make it more difficult to follow page numbers in class discussion. The prices quoted are from Books in Print; keep in mind that the bookstore will add a markup to these prices for new books but may also be able to get less expensive used copies. You may be able to do better on Amazon, but that requires you to build in the cost and time for delivery. Texts are listed more or less in the order we'll read them.

*Beckson, Karl (ed.) Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Academy Chicago Publishers. ISBN 978-0-89733-044-2 $18.95
*Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. 2nd Norton Critical Edition. WW Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-92754-2 $12.50
*Conrad, Joseph and Rudyard Kipling. Heart of Darkness, The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works of Empire. Ed. David Damrosch. Pearson/Longman. ISBN 978-0-321-36467-8 . $13.00
*Haggard, H. Rider. She. Broadview Press. ISBN 9781551116471 $14.95
Gissing, George. The Odd Women. WW Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-00610-0 $10.95
Pinero, Arthur W. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Players Press, Inc. ISBN 978-0-88734-719-1 $7.95
*Shaw, George Bernard. George Bernard Shaw's Plays. Ed.Sandie Byrne. Norton Critical Edition. WW Norton ISBN 978-0-393-00610-0 $17.75
Galsworthy, John. The Forstye Saga. Dover. ISBN 0486434079 $9.95
Wells, H.G. Tono Bungay. Penguin. ISBN 9780141441115 $14.00
Forster, E.M. Room with a View and Howards End. Penguin. ISBN978-0-451-52141-5 $6.95