ENL 3251 VICTORIAN LITERATURE - University of Florida

ENL 3251 VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Dr. C. Snodgrass; 4336 Turlington; 376-8362; [email protected]

© Chris Snodgrass 2010

SYLLABUS: READING SCHEDULE

REQUIRED TEXTS (books available at Orange & Blue Textbooks):

First Photocopy Supplement, including poems and essays not included elsewhere (Note: purchase
at Orange and Blue Textbooks)

Alfred Tennyson, Selected Poems (Dover)
Matthew Arnold poems (free download: http://www.poemhunter.com/matthew-arnold/)
R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dover)
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess and Other Poems (Dover)
A. W. Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (Broadview)
Second Photocopy Supplement, including texts not available elsewhere (note: purchase at Orange

and Blue Textbooks)
Aubrey Beardsley, Best Works of Aubrey Beardsley (Dover)
Wilde, Complete Shorter Fiction (Oxford)
Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (free download: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/790)

SCHEDULE

QUESTIONING GOD, COUNTRY, & CULTURE:

Week 1 Introduction

Background: Victorian Period
―Some Reasons Why Americans Value the British‖
―Facts, Themes, and Principles of Victorian Culture‖
―A Few of the Dichotomies that Haunted Victorians‖
―Chronicle of Some Important Events Bearing on

Victorian Age & Aftermath‖
―Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism‖
―Choice of Group Topics‖

Week 2 Alfred Lord Tennyson — introductory note on Tennyson;

―The Lotus Eaters,‖ ―The Lady of Shalott,‖ ―Ulysses,‖
―Locksley Hall,‖ ―[Tears, idle tears],‖ ―Tithonus‖;
introductory note on In Memoriam; from In
Memoriam: poems 4, 5, 34, 41, 54, 55, 56, 57, 108,
124; ―Charge of the Light Brigade,‖ ―Vastness.‖

A. Tennyson 1857

Week 3 Matthew Arnold — introductory note on Arnold
Week 4
Poetry: ―The Forsaken Merman,‖ ―To Marguerite,‖ ―To
Marguerite— Continued,‖ ―The Buried Life,‖ ―Dover
Beach,‖ ―The Scholar Gypsy,‖ ―Self-Deception,‖
―Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse‖

Criticism: ―Preface to Poems (1853),‖ excerpts from ―Study
of Poetry‖

M. Arnold 1883

Robert Louis Stevenson — introductory note on Stevenson; The Strange Case

of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND “THE WOMAN QUESTION”:

Week 5 Robert Browning — introductory reading on Browning,

―The Last Ride Together,‖ ―The Statue and the R. Browning 1865
Bust,‖ ―Prospice,‖ ―A Woman‘s Last Word,‖ ―The
Laboratory,‖ ―My Last Duchess,‖ ―Porphyria‘s
Lover,‖ ―Abt Vogler‖ ―The Bishop Orders His
Tomb,‖ ―Fra Lippo Lippi,‖ ―An Epistle, from
Karshish‖

Week 6 Group Presentation on the Brownings’ Relationship (Tuesday, February 8)

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

First Class Period:
Robert Browning (continued) — ―Andrea Del Sarto‖
Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Virginia Blaine, ―Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(1806–1861)‖; ―The Lady‘s ‗Yes‘,‖ ―Bertha in the Lane,‖ ―Loved Once,‖
―Hiram Powers‘ ‗Greek Slave‘,‖ ―A Man‘s Requirements‖; from Songs
from the Portuguese: poems 3, 4, 5, 13, 22, 29, 43, and 44.

Second Class Period: George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne] — introductory
note on Egerton, ―A Little Gray Glove‖

Week 7 George Egerton and Ella D’Arcy

Introduction Note on the ―New Woman‖
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne] — introductory

note on Egerton, ―A Little Gray Glove,‖ ―Wedlock‖

Ella D’Arcy — introductory note on D‘Arcy, ―At George Egerton
Twickenham,‖ ―Irremediable‖

D‘Arcy, c. 1894

Week 8 Group Presentation on New Woman (Tuesday, February 22)

Arthur Wing Pinero — introductory note on Pinero, The

Second Mrs. Tanqueray

Arthur Wing Pinero

Week 9 Group Presentation on Victorian Painting (Tuesday, March 1)

High Victorian & Pre-Raphaelite Painting (in-class slides and analysis,

click indicated links and others on Snodgrass website:

http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/snod/3251_S11syllabus.pdf):

William Shakespeare Burton, The Wounded Cavalier

(1855); William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd

(1851), The Awakening Conscience (1853), The Lady of
Shalott (1889–92); John Everett Millais, The Woodman’s

Daughter (1951), Mariana (1851), Cherry Ripe (1879);
Hughes, April Love (1855–56); Edwin Long, The

Babylonian Marriage Market (1875); Dante Gabriel H. Hunt 1865

Rossetti 1863

Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), King Arthur’s Tomb (1854), The
Blessed Damozel (1875–78) [Fogg Art Museum Harvard], Astarte Syriaca

(1877); William Morris, Queen Guinevere (1857); Edward Burne-Jones,

Phyllis and Demophöon (1870), The Beguiling of Merlin (1874), Perseus

Slaying the Sea Serpent, or Doom Fulfilled (1876–88), The Depths of the
Sea (1887), The Depths of the Sea (2nd version), Pygmalion &

the Image: The Heart Desires (1868-78), Pygmalion & the
Image: The Hand Refrains (1868–78), King Cophetua and the

Beggar Maid (1884); Frederick Sandys, Morgan le Fay (1864);

Burne-Jones ‘74 John Spencer Stanhope, Eve Tempted (1877); Laurence Alma-
J. Waterhouse
Tadema, In the Tepidarium (1881); Herbert Draper, The Gates

of Dawn (1900), Ulysses and the Sirens (1909), Clyties of the

Mist (1912); Frank Dicksee, La Belle Dame Sans Merci Alma-Tadema 1876

(1902); Fredric Leighton, The Fisherman and the Siren (1856-

58), Athlete Struggling with a Python (1874-77), The Bath of

Psyche (c. 1890), Perseus and Andromeda (1891-94), Flaming

June (1895); Edward Poynter, The Cave of the Storm Nymphs

(1903); John Waterhouse, Pandora (1896), Ariadne (1898),

Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), Lamia (1905); John Collier,

Lilith (1887); John William Godward, The Delphic Oracle

(1898); F. Leighton 1888

Other European Artists:
William Bouguereau, Le Printemps [The Return of Spring] (1866), Cupidon
(1875), Naissance de Vénus [Birth of Venus] (1879); Alexandre Cabanal,
Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1897); Edouard
Manet, Olympia (1863), Woman with a Parrot, or Young Lady in 1866
(1866); Nana (1877); Auguste Renoir, Young Boy with a Cat (1868-69);
Carlos Schwabe, Medusa (1895), Franz von Stuck, Sin (1893), Kiss of the
Sphinx (1895); Félicien Rops, La Tentation de St-Antoine [The Temptation
of Saint Anthony] (1878), Pornokrates, or La Dame au cochon (1879); and
feel free to examine any others.

Week 10 Spring Break, No Class

Week 11 Group Presentation on Ghost stories or gothic legends underlying
Tomson/Watson’s poetry (Tuesday, March 15)

Graham R. Tomson [Rosamund Marriott Watson] — introductory note

on Marriott Watson; Virginia Blaine, ―Rosamund Marriott Watson (1860–
1911)‖; ―A Ballad of the Were-Wolf,‖ ―Children of the Mist,‖ ―Epitaph,‖
―The Cage,‖ ―Nirvana,‖ ―Old Pauline,‖ ―Ballad of the Bird-bride,‖
―Vespertilia,‖ ―Hic Jacet‖

LIFE, ART, AND COUNTERCULTURE:
Week 12 Aubrey Beardsley — Best Works of Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 1–74.

Week 13 Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde

First Class Period: Beardsley (continued) — Best Works of
Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 75–107, 114–60; the

unexpurgated pictures from Lysistrata in the

photocopy packet.

Second Class Period: A. Beardsley 1894
Oscar Wilde — introductory notes on Wilde
Week 14 Criticism: ―The Critic as Artist‖

Oscar Wilde

First Class Period: Wilde (continued) —
Group Presentation on Wilde’s Fairy Tales (Tuesday, April 5)
Fiction: from Complete Shorter Fiction: ―The Happy

Prince,‖ ―The Nightingale and the Rose,‖ ―The
Fisherman and his Soul‖

Second Class Period: Wilde, Complete Shorter Fiction
(continued)

OPTIONAL EXTRA CREDIT ASSIGNMENT(S) DUE

Week 15 Oscar Wilde (continued) — Lady Windermere’s Fan Oscar Wilde 1894

Week 16 Oscar Wilde (continued) — Lady Windermere’s Fan (continued)

Review

COMPREHENSIVE FINAL EXAM

Black Cape, Self-Portrait Propert
Salome Bookplate

BRIEF LIST OF POSSIBLE SECONDARY READINGS

GENERAL BACKGROUND
Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind
D. C. Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death
Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality

John R. Reed, Victorian Conventions
Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
Julia Prewitt Brown, A Reader’s Guide to the Nineteenth-Century English Novel
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality
Roy Porter & Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: . . . Sexual Knowledge in Britain
Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England
Victorian Web, http://ernie.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Victorian.html

QUESTIONING GOD, COUNTRY, AND CULTURE
J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God
Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (biography)
Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson
James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems
David Shaw, Tennyson’s Style
Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (biography)
Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold
John Pick, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poet and Priest (biography)
Daniel A. Harris, Unbidden Inspirations: The “Terrible Sonnets” of Hopkins
Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
Vedder and Hirsch, eds., Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years

LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND “THE WOMAN QUESTION”
Irvine & Honan, The Book, the Ring, & the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (Browning)
W. David Shaw, The Dialectical Temper (Browning)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconography
Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites
David Sonstroem, Rossetti and the Fair Lady
Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (biographies)
Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (biographies)
Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting
Linda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain
Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies
Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers
Sally Mitchell, The New Girl
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle

Culture
Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels
Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women . . . in Victorian Culture
Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady
Rita S. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse: . . . Late-Victorian Feminist Novels

LIFE, ART, AND COUNTERCULTURE
John A. Lester, Jr., Journey Through Despair
Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties
Gail Marshall, ed, The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle
Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
E. Chamberlin and S. Gilman, eds, Degeneration
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Fin de Siècle
John Stokes, In the Nineties
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde: A Biography
Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde (biography)
Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Wilde and the Victorian Public
Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley (biography)
Ian Fletcher, Aubrey Beardsley
Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque

MISCELLANEOUS OTHER TOPICS
James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature
Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels
Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing
Edward Said, Orientalism