ENG324H1

Early Victorian Novels

British novels from the middle of the nineteenth century still speak to us—in part because so many of their concerns remain our concerns: questions of gender and sexuality, social class, and race and colonialism, among many others. In this course, we will read fiction that addresses those questions and, in the process, reshapes the very form of the novel. Reading fiction by authors such as Dickens, Brontë, and Gaskell, we will consider issues of class, identity, and self-making as they arise in first-person narratives, the industrial novel, and the beginnings of sensation fiction. This course concentrates on the novel as it developed over roughly the first half of the Victorian era and is envisioned as a complement to (though independent of) ENG325H1 Late Victorian Novels.