This course takes a cultural studies approach to literary criticism, using primary sources to illuminate and investigate Victorian fiction. At the core of the syllabus will be five novels, selected for their various modes of engaging Victorian reading practices. Woven between these novels will be a series of independent research projects that will send students into the library stacks and onto the internet to ferret out images and articles from a vast array of nineteenth-century journals and magazines. This material, culled from the popular press, will allow us, as a class, to paint a more richly detailed picture of the nineteenth century, as we work to situate the novel within a broader cultural context.

To help us make sense of this rich material and to further disentangle the relationships between popular culture and literature we will draw upon the growing body of scholarship on periodicals and serialized fiction. The adventurous souls who brave this course will be reading primary texts and scholarly essays almost every week and spending a lot of time conducting primary research in the pages of Victorian periodicals. By the end of the semester, these students will have a solid knowledge of the five core novels along with a deeper understanding of the reading practices, literary issues, rhetorical devices, and social concerns of the nineteenth century. These intrepid archival adventurers will also have a nifty new methodology to add to their research toolboxes.

This lively course is designated a cultural/critical studies course.