Title: 19TH CENTURY BRITISH PROSE (3)

PRQ:

"So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them -- winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the scene turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life..." (Elia, "A Chapter on Ears," 1823).

We will read chapters on ears, not to mention noses and throats, dissertations on roast pigs, essays on sewer systems, letters from gaols, stories of a panic, attacks on Liberalism, apologies for poetry, delineations of the two nations, and so on; I do promise that we will stop short of  "habitat[ing]" ourselves.  The course will explore such divers forms of 19th-C. British prose utterance as the newspaper article, the journal article, the scientific precis, the essay, the journal entry, the letter, the autobiography ("life writing"), the biography, the gloss, the story, and, of course, the novel.  Our prosers may well include Lamb, Hazlitt, Dorothy Wordsworth, Carlyle, Barrett Browning, Eliot, Bronte, Darwin, Mill, Engels, Martineau, Ellis, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, and Wilde.      

1. 10% Presentation (more info. forthcoming).
2. 20% Short paper (about five pages; more info. forthcoming).
3. 50% Longer paper (twelve to fifteen pages; more info. forthcoming).
4. 20% Late-term examination (two two-page take-home exam. essays on selected topics).

(Amazon.com has good deals on most of these: the prices quoted are from Amazon; the highlighted text is the course textbook)

Course Packet of older prose (VCB).
1. Arnold, Matthew. Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of  Political Thought), Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. [ISBN (paperback) 0-521- 37796-x, $13.00]
2. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [ISBN (paperback) 0-192836730, $9.56]
3. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Norton, 2001. [ISBN 0-393-97560-6, $?]
4. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: Penguin, 1985. [ISBN 0-14-043207-8, $9.95]
5. Morris, William. News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics). New York: Penguin, 1994. [ISBN  (paperback) 0-140433309, $11.20] etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MorNews]

6. Mundhenk, Rosemary J., and LuAnn McCracken Fletcher, eds. Victorian Prose: An Anthology. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. [ISBN (paperback) 0-231-11027-8, $22.50]
7. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice (Classic History). New York: Penguin, 2001. [ISBN  (paperback) 0-14- 1390654, $12.21]