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8:90
Victorian Fiction: Course Information and Assignments

M W 1:30-2:20, Room 213 EPB

Instructor: Florence Boos florence-boos@uiowa.edu

http://english.uiowa.edu/courses/boos/victfiction08
Office: 319 EPB, office phone 335-0434 (answering machine)
Office hours: most afternoons after class until 3 p. m.; Fridays 3-4 p. m.

Textbooks at IMU:

Handouts will be provided for selections by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Cooper and Ernest Jones. I will also provide copies of critical readings on Victorian fiction.

Course Requirements:

  1. contributions to class discussion: please read the assignment before class and come prepared to ask questions and comment on unusual features of the text.

  2. From time to time, I will ask students to give a brief class presentation on an author's life, and/or to prepare responses and questions for our readings.

  3. journal/reading responses: please prepare 6 reading responses, the equivalent of two double-spaced typed pages each, to be posted on Icon so that your fellow students may read them. At least three of your postings should take the form of a response to a posting by a fellow student. Three of your responses should be on course readings, and three on literary criticism about Victorian works of fiction. For this latter, I will give you a short bibliography of suggested readings and/or provide copies. Please try to submit one response roughly every two weeks, so that your responses won't be backed up at the end of the semester.

  4. In addition to posting these responses to the class web site, you will be asked to write a six page critical/research paper, and a six page final take-home essay/examination.

    Your critical/research paper must be based on research in the biographies, book-length critical studies, and critical articles on the author you have chosen (that is, you cannot merely use web-page citations). It is due March 14th, 2008; you will be asked to hand in an bibliography/outline/draft in early March.

  5. The final essay/take-home exam will be a comparative critical discussion of the works of two or more authors you have read during the course.

Your final presentations will be during the last week of classes, but the final draft of your essay is due May 16th, 2008.

Sample Suggested Research/Critical Paper Topics:

“The Old Nurse’s Tale” as a Christmas Story
The Narrator in “The Old Nurse’s Tale” and “Lois the Witch”
Hysteria and Violence in “Lois the Witch”
Gaskell’s Views on Religion in “The Old Nurse’s Tale” and “Lois the Witch”
The Uses of History in “Lois the Witch”
Form and Meaning in Cooper’s “Merrie England” and Jones’s “The Wrongs of Woman”
The Relationship of Subplots in Our Mutual Friend/Mystery and Surprise in OMF; Dickens’ Creation of Suspense in OMF
The Role of Illustrations in OMF
Serialization and the Structure of OMF/ The Design of Chapters and Books in OMF
OMF as a Satire of Contemporary Victorian Society
Humor/the Grotesque/Contrast in OMF
Family/Surrogate Family Relationships in OMF; Courtship and Marriage in OMF
Lives of the Underclass/ Pollution/Crime and the Police in Our Mutual Friend
The Narrator in Middlemarch (could be subdivided)
Beginnings and Endings in Middlemarch (structure of books, chapters, plots)
Interconnected Plots/Relationship in Middlemarch
Money and Morality in Middlemarch
St. Teresa and the Man of Science: Parallel Plots in Middlemarch
Interrelated Plots in Middlemarch
Provincial Politics/ Province vs. Metropole  in Middlemarch
Middlemarch and Victorian Science
Middlemarch and Victoiran Politics
Middlemarch and Victorian Religion
Class Relationships/Economics in Middlemarch
The Death of Featherstone in Middlemarch
Art and the World of Culture in Middlemarch
The Double Marriage Plot: Casaubon and Ladislaw
Moral Development in Middlemarch
The Search for Vocation in Middlemarch
Marriage as an Ideal in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

8:90 Victorian Fiction, Final Paper/Exam:
You are asked to give a 5-7 minute presentation on your topic during class on either Friday May 2nd or Monday May 5th, 2008. The final version is due in both e-mail and paper form Friday May 16th at 5 p. m.

You should write an essay of at least six pages contrasting some aspect of two novels or short stories we have studied, discussing features of style, theme, sensibility, or Victorian literary/cultural taste. If the works you discuss are from different decades of the century, you should consider whether their qualities reflect shifts in literary preoccupations as the century progressed. Your essay, in other words, should comment not only on the works themselves but how they express thematic concerns or stylistic qualities of their respective authors and/or periods.

Your essay should include comments on stylistic features of the works you discuss: structure, language, characterization, interlocking plots, narrative voice, authorial point of view, use of imagery, allegory and allusion, and relation to prior texts.

Works of fiction we have read have included Elizabeth Gaskell, “Lois the Witch,” Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend,  George Eliot, Middlemarch; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; Margaret Oliphant, “The Open Door” and “The Portrait,” George Gissing, The Odd Women, William Morris, News from Nowhere, Oscar Wilde,  The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet.”
Topics you might consider for contrast include:
the origins of intolerance/treatment of outsiders
childhood/mistreatment of children
the tension between realism and romance
the British empire in ideal and reality
Victorian views of women/ the “Woman Question” in Victorian fiction
masculinity and “manliness” in Victorian fiction
portraiture as symbol
the meaning of death/death as a threshold
themes of death and violence
the uses of history
narrative arrangement; the role of the narrator
geography and landscape/ regions of Britain
“Britishness” vs. foreigness
motivation for work; the nature of creative work
parent/child relationships
marriage in Victorian literature / themes of adultery and “free love”
crime and criminality, social marginality
religious imagery/revisionist uses of faith/issues of belief and doubt
the social meaning of religion
introspection, the divided or alienated self
views on education
views on science (e. g. Eliot, Oliphant)
the oppressions of convention/social opinion
myth and legend
the conditions for romantic love
issues of fate/social determination
social hierarchy/issues of class and marginalization
redemption/human fellowship/alternative societies or ideals
the nature of beauty; the nature of morality

illustrations for novels (e. g. the original illustrations to Our Mutual Friendpleasure and relaxation
modes of achieving narrative closure / beginnings and endings