Nineteenth Century British Literature

1. Using a combination of poetry and essay sources, discuss the evolution of aesthetic criticism and theory from the Romantics through the Aesthetic Movement near the end of the century. (Feel free to focus on key moments in this progression, rather than trying to cover the entire century in depth.)

2. Remembering that a novel’s meaning arises out of the particular social context in which it is written and read, discuss the evolution of the heroine from the 18th-century Pamelas and Moll Flanders, who rise above their situation via marital/sexual conquests, to the 19th-century Emmas and Esthers who find fulfillment in traditional domestic roles. At the same time, examine the ways in which changing social definitions of women’s roles led to bitterness towards marriage in the work of other 19th-century women writers.

3. If the 18th-century novel is seen as participating in the rise of bourgeois society, to what degree is the 19th-century novel concerned with maintaining the status quo? (Look at issues of gender, empire, and/or class.)

4. In what ways were writers like Keats and Byron critics of the very Romanticism they professed? In your answer, concentrate on particular poems by each (you may also want to draw comparisons with Wordsworth or Coleridge).

5. Novelists in the nineteenth century reveal similarities in the conventions of their art (i.e., practices in point of view, characterization, subject matter, the use of realism, and so on). They share thematic values as well. In other words, we can discover associations between technique and philosophical (or ideological) approach. But that generalization is also qualified by recognizable differences in both technique and theme. Discuss at least three different novels, examining selected aspects of technique and theme. Choose from the following works: Vanity Fair, North and South, Barchester Towers, Middlemarch, Bleak House, and The Odd Women.

6. Imagine a dialogue between Mill and Dickens on the proper place of women in Victorian culture. What might they say to each other? How might their views, their language, and their values differ? Could they agree on anything or would they merely talk past each other?

7. Whatever its origins, the bildungsroman (also called the apprenticeship novel or the novel of maturation) was a mainstay of the 19th-century novelists, Dickens’s David Copperfield being one obvious example. Compose a thesis and discuss what you deem important qualities in the bildungsroman and how they are employed in two of the following novels: Emma, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

8. You have on your list two monologues of the Italian Renaissance by Browning (“Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi”) as well as Pater’s preface and conclusion to his famous collection of essays. Both Browning and Pater use the Renaissance as a canvas on which to paint their own ideas about art. What are these ideas? Why is the Renaissance their chosen canvas? On what would they agree and disagree?

9. Using Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads and two texts of your own choosing, discuss how 19th-century writers represent “common life.” Wordsworth argues for the importance of the “ordinary language of men,” especially of those situated in “low and rustic life.” Do other writers share his faith in the low and rustic as a touchstone of value? Does he thoroughly believe this himself? (Possible choices of texts include, but are not limited to Arnold’s “Function of Criticism,” Hopkins’ “Felix Randall,” Hardy’s poems or Tess, Ruskin, Eliot, and Dickens.)

10. If you were to teach the survey of English literature to undergraduates, focusing heavily on 19th-century poetry, what elements of technique and aesthetics, of social context, of historical difference would guide your work? Which poets would be indispensable to your course? What would be the central questions that guide your approach? Finally, choose one poet from the latter part of the Victorian period and discuss how you would present that poet’s work in a way that furthers the larger goals of your course.

11. Even before Harold Bloom promulgated his notions of literary inheritance and misprision and certainly since that time, critics examined the importance of precursors for later writers. Choose two of the following pairs of writers (or suggest your own) and examine the complex legacy of the earlier writer for the later one: Charlotte Bronte and Byron; Tennyson and Keats; Browning and Shelley; Arnold and Wordsworth; Hopkins and Browning (or Pater); Hardy and Keats.

12. A range of critics, from G.K. Chesterton to the Marxists, have focused on the effects of industrialization and urbanization portrayed in the 19th-century novel. More recently we have turned particular interest to how gender is represented in the urban and industrial world of the Victorian age. Questions come to mind: how are women portrayed? What differences emerge between their representation and other characters? What do such differences (or similarities) tell us about the 19th-century novel? Discuss this issue of gender in the industrial-urban setting in at least three different works: North and South, The Odd Women, Hard Times, and Jude the Obscure. You may add to or substitute from this suggested list if you wish.

13. It is useful to talk about the pervading characteristics of the Victorian age: the belief in progress; the reliance on the laissez-faire approach to individual improvement in a class-oriented society; the spirit of compromise and reform. But hovering all about this splendid confidence was a sense of division, a double- mindedness. England was the New Eden; England was an industrial wasteland. In other words in the midst of the glories of the High Victorian there was the Anti-Victorian. This binary positioning of terms pertains to historical, cultural, or literary subject matter. Take a thesis and discuss what you see as key aspects of the Victorian and the Anti-Victorian equation in terms of the 19th-century novel.

14. For your dissertation you are giving a good deal of thought to prefaces—and for this exam you have read a number of interesting ones ranging from Wordsworth to Robert Browning, from Ruskin to Pater. One way to regard prefaces is to explore the ways in which they both defend a writer’s work and establish, or attempt to establish, the standards and issues on which the work will be judged. Choosing two or three writers, discuss what sorts of moves they make in their prefaces. How does the experience of reading these prefaces shape—or deform—our reading of the text?

15. In many ways we see in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood an invention of the avant-garde. Discuss how you see the movement in the wider context of Victorian culture. In what ways did the PRB (including Christina Rossetti, at least in an honorary way) contest Victorian culture? In what ways were the PRB dependent upon the very elements of the culture that they deplored? Does this formulation—of an avant-garde contesting a dominant culture—adequately capture the complexities of the movement?

16. Matthew Arnold lamented that his was an unpoetic age; yet this refrain was not really novel. Carlyle and Wordsworth in their different ways had said much the same thing. Choose at least one poet from the beginning of the nineteenth century and one who came later and discuss how their work or aesthetic theory addresses the notion that their culture might be fundamentally inimical to poetry. What does “poetry” stand for in this kind of thinking? Do you see any poet who might object to Arnold’s formulation? (Be sure to discuss particular poems as well as poets’ theoretical statements.)

17. The role of women in 19th-century England has been a position fraught with complicating, sometimes impossibly conflicting, factors. Yet, one might also see this as a time of expanding agency for women—in keeping with a general trend in the 19th-century to empower the disenfranchised. Choose three to four texts and discuss the shifting role of female agency in 19th-century England.

18. With the 1832 Reform Bill, the nineteenth century can be viewed as a period when concern for the poor and disenfranchised manifested itself in political changes that were meant to legally improve the material conditions of certain classes. Resented and resisted by those who had traditionally monopolized political, economic, and social power, these changes nonetheless involved shifts in how the “haves” were distinguished from the “have nots.” Choose three to four texts and discuss how class markers shifted during this time of political and social reform. (You may choose to focus on the connections between aesthetic discourse and changing class definitions and relationships.)

19. In many ways, the rhetorical philosophy of Thomas Sheridan, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and others, was in dialogue with the social and political upheavals of the enlightenment, and these rhetorical texts continued to inflect and be inflected by their relationship with the novel into the nineteenth century. Using two or three literary texts, examine the implications of their selection, reflection, and deflection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century rhetorical theories.

20. Wordsworth claims, in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, that modern times evince “a state of almost savage torpor” which results from “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” His own verse, he says, treats instead “humble and rustic life.” This contrast between rural and urban, agricultural and industrialized pursuits underlies much 19th-century writing. Choose three writers, at least one from the early part of the century and one writing after 1840, and outline their positions vis-à-vis urbanization and rural life. Do they read industrialization as “progress” or in some other light? Do they attribute their sources of inspiration to the urban or to the rural scene? Why?

21. It is a commonplace that Victorian high seriousness among writers arose in part from their compulsion to connect ethics and art or, in many cases, to link ethics, art, and religion. Matthew Arnold, for example, was famously unsympathetic to Chaucer’s humor because, in public at least, he couldn’t square his notions of art and ethics with Chaucer’s bawdy and satirical wit. Choose either Wilde or Ruskin or Arnold and compare his notions of the ethical importance of art with the ideas or aesthetic practice of one other 19th-century writer. How do these writers conceive the connections between art and ethics? How do these writers put forward or critique the idea of the artist’s social responsibility? What, if anything, is the role of humor, satire, invective or irony in this connection? (You may choose two of the three writers listed in the question or one of them and any other writer on your list.)

22. I know in reading your American literature list you became interested in the issue of hybrid forms. One almost begins to think that the nineteenth century created nothing else, for when we survey your reading list many texts could qualify as in some ways hybrid combinations of genres. Likely candidates include Don Juan, “Maud,” Aurora Leigh, Scenes of Clerical Life, Cranford, and possibly Frankenstein. Choose three of these and discuss the sources and nature of hybridity in these texts. What genres are combined? What is the result? What might be the “political unconscious” of these texts—i.e. the kind of cultural / political presumptions embedded in these texts at the level of form?

23. In our discussion of your list, we canvassed the issue of agency for women—and obviously a text like Mill’s The Subjection of Women is squarely about the civic and social roles of women. But if we turn the question on its head, it becomes apparent that as women redefined their place in society, so too men found that the definition of masculinity was up for grabs. Choose three texts from your list which seek to define masculinity. How do these texts present possibilities for masculinity? What are the potential contradictions within notions of the masculine? You may find helpful such notions as “manliness” and “gentleman,” though certainly definitions of masculinity in the nineteenth century go well beyond these notions.

24. Many writers in the nineteenth century addressed themselves to the artist’s or writer’s social obligations. Using either Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads or Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” along with two other texts, including one from later in the century, write an essay in which you examine how these writers understand the artist’s obligation to society. What social or economic pressures or pressures of the literary marketplace shape their thinking? On what grounds do they argue for the continuing importance of art—social, political, aesthetic, some combination? (You may of course discuss both Wordsworth and Shelley and one later text, or you may choose two texts not mentioned here.)

25. Your list, when you stop to consider, actually includes a rather remarkable number of sonnets—among others “It is a Beauteous Evening,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” “The World is Too Much With Us,” “Ozymandias,” “Bright Star,” “In an Artist’s Studio,” “Cardinal Newman,” “To George Sand,” and a number of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Discuss how several 19th-century poets make use of the sonnet form. What traditions shaped their revival of the form, after its relative eclipse in the eighteenth century? Do you find the sonnet form serves their aesthetic and thematic purposes? What, if any, innovations would you identify in the 19th-century practice of the sonnet?

26. It is by now a commonplace that 19th-century intellectuals were immersed in various forms of historicism, from the higher criticism of the Bible, to the medieval and gothic revivals, to an existential historicism that emphasized the imaginative resuscitation of the lived experience of history. Chose two or three writers on your list for whom the encounter with the past was crucial and explore their approaches to history. How does each writer define or practice “history”? What purpose is served by the turn to the real or imagined past? How does the encounter with the past provide a vantage point for understanding the present? Is the relationship between past and present viewed in terms of a progressivist teleology (as in Macaulay, for example, who is not on your list) or in some other way?

27. For many years Ian Watt’s account of the rise of the novel as a bourgeois form, a form for and of the middle class, seemed satisfactory. More recently critics have complicated this account by introducing notions of gender and nation into the equation. How might you use the dialectic among these three elements—class, gender, and nation—to approach two or three novels on your list? How could you use this analytical scheme to teach these novels to undergraduate students in either a literature survey or an introduction to narrative course?

28. Choose three texts from your list, at least one person and one work of prose, and discuss the elegiac element in them. Would you characterize these texts as formal elegies or would you view them as texts each of which involves an elegiac tone? How do they resemble or differ from each other with respect to the theological contexts of elegy? What sources of comfort, in other words, can the writer call upon? What is the cultural as opposed to the personal work of lament in these texts?

29. Any number of the texts you have chosen involve species of haunting. And indeed from the gothic novel (not to say Dr. Johnson’s ruminations upon ghosts) the elements of haunting recur in 19th-century texts. Obviously haunting is about the supernatural…yet, given that these texts were written in an age when the very existence of the supernatural was increasingly open to question, what kinds of aims or ends do such stories entail? From a postmodern perspective, one Carlyle would no doubt call “descendental,” are such texts still powerful? If so, why? If not, why not? Choose two or three texts to focus your answer.

30. If you were challenged to use several of the novels on your list as part of teaching a large history of the genre, which ones would you choose and why? What aspects of the development of the genre would you choose to illustrate with these texts? What historical contexts would you adduce as important? What kinds of developments would you seek to explore with your students?

31. Select three authors from your list, including at least one poet, and write an essay tracing the aesthetic of decadence. How might one understand the social critique, if any, implicit in an aesthetic represented by Baudelaire, Wilde or others on your list whom you might consider representative of or precursors to fin-de-siècle decadence? You might consider the common late (and even mid-) Victorian charge that decadence was antithetical to morality. How would you conceptualize the notions of aestheticism and of decadence as social critique? Or do you consider such a conceptualization misguided from the start?

32. Nancy Armstrong argues that the novel reimagined the domestic as a space in which political concerns could be worked out, even while instantiating separate spheres ideology. Discuss at least three novels within this paradigm. How do these novels use the domestic and why? How do these portrayals of the domestic affect the role of women in particular?

33. The nineteenth-century expended a lot of energy on the “Condition of England” question. Paying attention to historical changes through the period, discuss at least two poems, one novel, and one piece of non-fiction prose in relation to the narrative, rhetorical, and formal strategies they use to address this issue. Examples of such strategies might include: realism, reader address, first-person narration, poetic forms, metaphor, etc.

34. Bob Dylan claimed that, “The times they are a’changin.’” But for the Victorians it was time itself that was changing. Think of the ways, for example, in which Darwin, the railway, industrialization, and serial publication, reconceived time during the period. Discuss at least three Victorian texts in relationship to their treatment of Victorian time. In your selection of texts be sure to choose texts from more than one genre—e.g., be sure you go beyond the novel for texts to focus your discussion.

35. Select one poem and one novel which you might teach in an upper level undergraduate course on nineteenth-century literature.  Develop a reading for each of these texts in light of two different critics’ views of the issues they raise.  How might you use these critical approaches along with your own understandings to triangulate these texts for your students?  What major historical, formal, thematic and textual issues would you raise?  How would the critics you have chosen allow you to sharpen and focus your questions or to provide points of genuine debate for your students?

36. Although critics of modernism often think of modernist texts as having problematic and sometimes open endings, nineteenth-century texts too could be regarded as presenting significant problems of closure.  Chose three or four texts and discuss the ways they come to closure or resist closure.  What are the ideological, thematic or formal issues that create the possibilities and the problematics of closure in these texts?
37. Catherine Gallagher argues that “the industrial novelists take no sly satisfaction in formal self-reflexiveness because their polemical purposes, the same purposes that lead them to question the novel’s form, also lead them to make excessively naïve mimetic claims for it.” Using at least three examples, discuss the extent to which this assertion holds. 
38. Using poems from both the Romantic and Victorian periods, discuss how these poems use performance or the performative as a way to interrogate notions of female sexuality. 
39. Using a novel, a poem, and a piece of non-fiction prose, discuss how and why nineteenth-century texts make of the family a trope to articulate public or national concerns.  Is such extension of the familial to the national or the public taken for granted in the texts you have chosen, critiqued, or celebrated? 
40. It is commonly said that Victorian literature is obsessed with the crisis of faith. But is this an adequate focus for periodization? Could we argue that matters of religious understanding, belief, and ritual are concerns across the century? Or are there historical  changes in the ways people approached religion that might be marked during the long nineteenth century? Would it be proper to say, even, that “religion” morphs into many other realms, the structures of feeling it entails appearing in texts and social locations we don’t always call religion or religious? Choose three texts, including one non-fiction text, to address these issues. 
41. We typically think of Victorian fiction, especially Victorian realism, as having at its heart a notion of bildung and even the form of the bildungsroman. You have Jane Eyre and Great Expectations on your reading list as a testimony to the importance of the genre. Would it be possible to argue that sensation in fiction and sentiment in poetry are the counterweight to, the opposite of bildung? Using either Jane Eyre or Great Expectations and two or three other texts (either poetry or fiction) make an argument that bildung and sentiment / sensation are compatible OR an argument that they are not.   You can of course take a middle way if you like. In short, are sentiment and bildung, sensation and bildung like oil and water—or do you find them mixed? 
42. Nineteenth-century England often characterized itself as a nation of progress, as looking forward.  However, and these positions are not necessarily incommensurate, it was also a century characterized by nostalgia, a looking to the past. Choose three texts (at least one Romantic and one Victorian) and discuss how each treats the past and to what end.

43. How do nineteenth-century writers theorize and/or represent the role of the poet? Do theories of the role of the poet change over the course of the nineteenth century? In answering, discuss at least two poems as examples.

44. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that early British women writers were constrained by the patriarchal binary of woman as monster or angel. To what extent do you think that binary still holds in the representation of women in the nineteenth century? How do women writers of this period intervene in or revise that binary?

45.  The specter of the French Revolution looms large over the nineteenth century. Select three texts (at least one Romantic and one Victorian and at least one poem), and discuss how they represent or respond to the French Revolution and why.

46.  Several critics (Gikandi, Spivak, Said, Trumpener) have pointed out that nineteenth-century notions of “Englishness” relied upon the construction of an “other.” Demonstrating familiarity with theories of the “other,” discuss at least three texts in their constructions of Englishness through the “other.”

47. Consider this scenario. You’ve just been hired as an assistant professor in a department with a doctoral program. The Head is planning the course schedule and asks you to think about teaching the nineteenth-century novel course; she adds that basic coverage is an essential part of training graduate students but also stresses that “English 700" needs fresh thinking in its conception. She suggests you consider texts, current technology, and pedagogical approach. Write a narrative describing what your course would look like, what you would do.

48. For decades critics argued that Charles Dickens was the most important novelist of the Victorian age, others that it was George Eliot, still others that Thomas Hardy was “the Victorian” (set precariously between two centuries) who surmounted the age and led the way to modernism. While all such arguments are, shall we say, arguable, they do generate interesting passion when talking about the genre. Let’s engage your obvious passion for the novel. Who are the two or three most important novelists on your list? Why? What contributions make them salient?

49. Although their critical reputations suffered or disappeared in the face of Victorian fears of radicalism, and/or the later reactions of modernism against Victorian aesthetics, women stood among the foremost British poets of the nineteenth century.  Barbauld, Smith, Hemans, Barrett Browning, C. Rossetti—all achieved popular and, in their time, critical success.  Would you argue that there is a distinctively female lineage of poets in the nineteenth century, represented in part by the "poetesses" of the mid-century, a lineage which can be traced in shared subject matter, political positions, and/or aesthetic choices? Or would you understand the individual women poets as more closely aligned with individual male poets—that is, in lines of descent not  necessarily defined by gender? Draw your supporting examples from two or three of the women poets mentioned above, with the addition (for contrast or comparison) of appropriate male poets.  These might be Burns, W. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, R. Browning, Arnold, or whomever you find useful. 

50. As the novel's popular and critical fortunes continued to rise through the nineteenth century, poets made many attempts to either reserve special fields of activity for their own art once narrative had been lost to it, or to regain narrative for poetry through the practice of the long poem (or other generic accommodations).  Not infrequently, the same poets were involved in both alternatives.  Discuss the strategic and formal responses to the novel in the poetry of three of the following:  Smith, W. Wordsworth, Byron, Hemans, Arnold, Tennyson, R. Browning, E. B. Browning, D. Rossetti, C. Rossetti. (You may substitute other poets you've studied if you wish.)

51. The Bildungsroman  remains a perennial topic in the scholarship. As recently as 2008, Comparative Literature Studies published an article entitled “Apprenticeship of the Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Invention of History, ca. 1770–1820.” In our discussions you showed interest in the subject. Identify what you see as key characteristics of the Bildungsroman and how they work in three exemplary texts from your list, which may be novels and/or long poems: one from the early nineteenth century, one from the High-Victorian era, one from the late-Victorian era.

52. Choose a Romantic poet and trace his/her influence in the works of two Victorian writers, one a novelist and one a poet.  "Influence" may be understood to include emulation, reaction, or a mixture of both; it might involve politics, aesthetics, or both. Through this exercise, speculate on the relationship between Romantic poetics and Victorian writing. Examples might be Hemans into Barrett Browning and Gaskell, Keats into Tennyson and Wilde, Wordsworth into Arnold and Eliot.

53. Wordsworth’s Preface (1802) to Lyrical Ballads has often been referred to as a revolutionary manifesto on poetry. Wordsworth discusses a number of goals, his “principal object” being to “choose incidents and situations from common life” and relate them “as far as possible” in a “selection of language really used by men.” He also offers an interesting examination of how “the language of prose may yet be well adapted to poetry.” How are these revolutionary goals of the Preface addressed (directly or indirectly) by poets other than Wordsworth in the nineteenth century? For example, what are some of the changes in poetic language and subject matter? Your discussion should have the scope of the century: poetry or prose treatises on poetry from the Romantic, Victorian, and late-Victorian eras.  You should focus on three writers, though you may briefly draw in other examples.

54. The Woman Question pervaded the high-Victorian age and eventually morphed into what the late-Victorians debated as the New Woman. Discuss what you see as important changes in the issue, the various categories and markers of femininity as revealed in different genres from the nineteenth century.

55. Is there such a thing as a female bildungsroman? How might it be distinct from a regular bildungsroman and why? Make your argument with reference to at least three literary examples from your nineteenth-century reading list.

56. The growth of female professions and professionals over the course of the nineteenth century challenged separate sphere ideology. Discuss several texts (at least one from the Romantic Period) in regards to their treatment of the relationship between women, work, and money.

57.  The development of prisons and insane asylum, including new definitions of and treatments for madness, was, as many historians have noted, a significant feature of nineteenth-century culture. Choose three texts from your list and discuss how the prison, the workhouse (as a kind of prison), or the madhouse became a focus for other cultural anxieties—about class, about masculinity and femininity, about sexuality, or about empire.  Be sure you discuss at least one text which is NOT a novel.  You need not, however, restrict your discussion to actual madhouses and prisons—metaphorical ones will also do.