Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission.

Recent offerings:

Spring 2010, Wilson

A study of Victorian poetry, prose, and fiction by the major authors: Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin, Morris, Hardy and Yeats. (Offered once every two years.) See Wilson’s course website for more information regarding the class and required texts.

Spring 2008, Wilson

Texts:

• The Eighteenth-Century “Grand Tour”: Roman ruins and the British sensibility.
• The English garden: From Versailles to the Picturesque to Burke and the Sublime.
• Rousseau and Blake.
• Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
• Horace Walpole and the gothic and the pagan.
• Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
• Paintings of Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and William Girtin.
• The 1840s: the emergence of photography, especially in the work of Henry Fox Talbert.
• Ruskin’s Modern Painters.
• Paintings of J. M. W. Turner
• Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
• The Pre-Raphaelites, in poetry and art, with an emphasis on D. G. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and J. W. Waterhouse.
• The journey to inner nature, the landscape of the mind: The “aesthetic” end of the century: Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley: decadent and perverse?  Does Freud belong here?

Using the resources of the Web and the technology of WebCT and PowerPoint, we’ll explore, first, the creation of the Eighteenth-century platform from which the British romantics launched their verbal and visual pyrotechnics, and then explore the Victorian reaction in image and word to the romanticism of Wordsworth and his view of the natural world.

Students will learn technical skills useful in their academic futures by preparing a PowerPoint presentation (I’ll teach you how to do this), and by publishing this work, along with a traditional academic essay, on my web site (http://www.umaine.edu/victorianlinks/).

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