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, 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.

The “novels,” rather: we will read four novels his time ‘round, and we will arrange our reading in non-fiction prose, much of it, so as to illuminate major Victorian issues in the fiction.

Our non-fiction prosers will include Lamb, Carlyle, Newman, Chambers, Norton, Darwin, MacCauley, Mill, Engels, Smiles, Leigh, Eliot, Bronte, Martineau, Ellis, Mollock, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, Kingsley, and Wilde.

Our prosers-in-fiction will include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and William Morris (n.b. none of the novels for this course was read in the Fall 2012 course, 663: “19^th-C British Fiction”).

Requirements:

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).

Texts: (the prices quoted were from Amazon.com a few years back; #8 is the course textbook):

1. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [ISBN (pbk) 0-192836730, $9.56]

2. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times (A Norton Critical Edition). New York: Norton, 2001. [ISBN (paperback) 0-393-97560-6]

3. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: Penguin, 1985. [ISBN 0-14-043207-8, $9.95]

4. 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 (pbk) 0-521-37796-x, $13.00]

5. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss: Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. [0-19-283364-2, $9.95]

6. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the Durbervilles: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1990 [ISBN-13:9780393959031, provide this be the paperback version. $18.57]

7. Morris, William. News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics). New York: Penguin, 1994. [ISBN (pbk) 0-140433309, $11.20] [etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MorNews]

8. 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]