Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines issues in Victorian literature and culture in a variety of genres and media from diverse geopolitical regions organized by various critical questions and approaches. Students with credit for ENGL 434 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course examines Victorian metropolitan and colonial writing in the context of ecological crisis. We will consider how the texts on our reading list define and explore the concept of nature in terms of processes that were set in motion, or intensified, in the nineteenth century, when extraordinary expansions of industrial technology and the worldwide web of communication forged ever tighter links between the geographic center of British Empire - England and London - and peripheries like South Africa, central Canada and British Columbia. We will explore some of the ways Victorian writers already understood the idea of nature to be inextricable from culture and entirely bound up with colonial power. We will reflect along with them on what nature, including human nature, was and is - and, indeed, what new natures may be. We will engage the period’s forceful literary commentaries on industrial and colonial practices and consequences together with no less affecting indirect expressions of unspecified mourning and unaccountable loss connected with the idea of nature. Most importantly, we will ask why and how these formulations matter today.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: