Required Reading
Primary
Texts
See Course Calendar for due date
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-53)
- William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Esmond (1852)
- Charlotte Bronte, Villette (1853)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854-55)
- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
- George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical (1866)
- Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset
(1866-67)
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Secondary
Texts (1851-1867)
Choose one for Oral Report
- Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867)
- Isabella Mary Beeton, The Book of Household Management
(1861)
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte
(1857)
- The
Germ. A Hypermedia Critical Edition
- Alexander William Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea:
Its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan
(1863)
- Harriet Martineau, British Rule in India: A Historical
Sketch (1857)
- Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(1852)
- Henry Mayhew, London Labour and
the London Poor (1861)
- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1862)
- Florence Nightingale, Writings
- Caroline Norton, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth
Century (1854)
- C. S. Roundell, England and her Subject Races, with
special reference to Jamaica (1866)
- John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies
(1865)
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Critical
Works on Mid-Victorian Fiction (1985-1996)
Choose one for Oral Report
- Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces:
the Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993)
- Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political
History of the Novel (1987)
- Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative
in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983)
- Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian
Social Fiction (1991)
- Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love
and the Form of Fiction (1987)
- Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British
Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (1977)
- Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature
and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988)
- Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture,
and Victorian Sensationalism (1992)
- N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels
(1986)
- Regina Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-representation
in Britain, 1832-1920 (1991)
- Catharine Gallager, The Industrial Reformation of
English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (1985)
- Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized
Dissent in the English marketplace, 1800-1885 (1995)
- Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic
Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (1991)
- Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female
Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (1986)
- Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial
(1991)
- Review
by Rosemary T. Vanarsdel (NCL)
- John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian
Fiction (1994)
- Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: the Consolations
of Gender in the English Novel (1990)
- Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels: Middle-class
Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995)
- George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns
of Science in Victorian Fiction (1988)
- Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in
the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (1992)
- Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures
and Women's Bodies (1987)
- Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity,
Culture, and Victorian Narrative (1995)
- D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (1988)
- Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets:
Women, Representation, and the City (1995)
- Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic
Security and the Victorian Novel (1994)
- Review
by Catherine Gallagher (NCL)
- Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological
Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988)
- Review
by Elizabeth Helsinger (NCL)
- Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural
Formation, 1830-1864 (1996)
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
- Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience
in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1996)
- Kathryn Bond Stockton, God Between Their Lips: Desire
Between Women in Irigaray, Bronte, and Eliot (1994)
- Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night: Narratives
of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992)
- Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (1985)
- Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
(1958)
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Historical
Works on Mid-Victorian England
Read one during first three weeks
of the course
- R. D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (1973)
- Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-1875
(1971)
- Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Themes
and People, 1851-1867 (1955)
- Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959)
- R. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian
Generation (1964)
- Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual
and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890 (1993)
- E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975)
- W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870
(1959)
- T.A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830-1886
(1994)
- Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government
in Victorian Britain (1993)
- Donald Southgate, The Passing of the Whigs, 1832-1886
(1962)
- F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society:
A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900
- Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline
of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981)
- G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
(1936)
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