ENG 262 - Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature

For English majors, this course satisfies the D-2 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar. This course can be repeated with a different topic.

SPECIAL TOPICS FOR S’2023

ENG 262.01 “Tomes of Solid Witchcraft”: Major Women Poets.

This course examines how women speak poetically to each other across time, beyond the confines of what Virginia Woolf called the “private house.” We view them as originators of meaning, thematically broaching issues of identity, society, religion, politics, and what it means to be intelligent, articulate, and transcendent of cultural circumstance and restraint. Poems read will be drawn from Charlotte Smith, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo.

ENG 262.02 Monsters and Monstrosity

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that the monster is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment-of a time, a feeling, a place.” This seminar reads literary monsters - and/or the merely “monstrous” - with a view to how such characters reflect and trouble the values, fears, and anxieties of 19^th century Britain. In doing so, we will interrogate the construction of monstrosity in an age of industrialization, colonization, and rapid technological developments. Topics for discussion will include issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, and empire in texts such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically