ENGL 537

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar Victorian Lit

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Victorian studies or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 537 class schedule data for fall 2019
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	30193	Lecture-Discussion	G	3:30PM -6:00PM	M	English Building	Courtemanche, E	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Section Title: Victorian Historicism Section Info: Topic: The Uses and Abuses of Victorian Historicism The field of Victorian studies has recently begun to challenge and rethink its dominant methodology of culturally-inflected historicism. Some scholars call for a renewed attention to form, to theory, or even to “presentism,” the long-deplored error of projecting your own era’s values onto the distant past. Complicating matters is the fact that secular historicism was a profoundly influential intellectual paradigm during the Victorian age, transforming the fields of theology, science, literature, and politics—including the romantic idea of the nation and fantasies of empire. In this class, we’ll try to understand the current theoretical debate by contrasting the Victorians’ own approaches to historical inquiry with our own. Readings will be drawn from Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Lytton Strachey, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the editors of Victorian Studies, members of the V21 Collective, and the volume Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire (ed. Burton and Hofmyer). Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.