ENGL 537

Spring 2021 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar Victorian Lit

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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 spring 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32276	Online	R	3:00PM -5:50PM	R	n.a.	Courtemanche, E	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/25/21-05/05/21 Section Info: English 537: Sustainability and Utopia in Victorian Britain - In the 19th century, both Marxist and capitalist visions of the future were based on “productivism,” or a belief that economic growth would lead to widely shared and stable prosperity. During this time new industrial uses were discovered for fossil fuels—the coal that powered steam engines, the petroleum that illuminated cities—paving the way for today’s anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, artists working in the Romantic tradition continued to worship Nature as a holistic and healing spiritual retreat from the stresses of modern life. At the intersection of these trends flourished a speculative literary tradition that projected new utopias, new systems for living, and new disasters extrapolated from the horrors of inhuman industrialism. In this class, we will read works chosen from all three of these intellectual movements, and from recent criticism that engages with the imperialist and extractive economies of Victorian Britain. These may include Charles Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Richard Jeffries’s After London, John Ruskin’s “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century,” Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Theodor Herzl’s Old New Land, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s and Vicky Albritton’s Green Victorians, the anthology Ecological Form (ed. Hensley and Steer), and Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.