**students please refer to the 2021 schedule for links to readings and updated assignments**
Often the Victorian era (1832-1901) is depicted as a period rigid in its attitudes toward morality, gender, and sexuality. However, nineteenth-century literature saw an array of “dangerous” people inhabit its pages: effeminate men, political women (also known as the New Woman), prostitutes, and hysterics to name a few. Victorians lived during a time of new emphasis on democracy and equality, scrutiny of marriage and property law, and, at times, openness to diversity in gender and sexuality. While our course will pay special attention to changing conceptions of the individual, sexuality, and gender, we also will look at the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, nationality, and other social factors. This course is an upper-level seminar in Victorian literature of many genres—poetry, drama, the novel, and non-fiction prose— by a variety of authors such as Lord Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud, Michael Field, and Mona Caird.
Victorian Sexualities Syllabus (2021 PDF)
Past Syllabi:
2016 Syllabus (PDF)
2015 Syllabus for ENGL 360-01/ WGST 300-03: Victorian Sexualities (PDF)