ENGL 326 - 19th-Century English Novel

Credits: (3)
This course will start with Jane Austen who is often described as the last novelist of the eighteenth-century and the first of the nineteenth. It will end with Thomas Hardy who is often thought of as the last novelist of the nineteenth-century and the first of the twentieth. In between, we will read works by such authors as Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Eliot, and Stoker. As we read the novels, we will try to understand them in relation to the culture in which they were written. These authors wrote in the years that followed the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth-century and in the years that preceded the American hegemony of the twentieth century. Most of them wrote during the years dominated by Queen Victoria, the longest reigning ruler in England’s history and the person who gave her name to the era and to the novels we will study.
This course fulfills British/European post-1650 requirement.