Department of English

Topic: Narrative Theory and Nineteenth-Century Literature - Beyond the Realist Novel

In nineteenth-century Britain the novel achieved an unprecedented literary and cultural dominance, with lasting consequences for literary studies. Critics have sometimes overemphasized Romantic poetry’s lyrical tendencies, marginalized Victorian poetry, and overly relied on the realist novel as the basis for narrative theory. This course resists those critical tendencies by studying a range of Romantic and Victorian narrative literature in conjunction with twentieth- and twenty-first-century narrative theory. Our primary texts will likely include the novels Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Bleak House, A Study in Scarlet, and The War of the Worlds; plays by Joanna Baillie and Oscar Wilde; and poetry by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Augusta Webster, Toru Dutt, and E. Pauline Johnson. The selections of narrative theory will represent a range of methods from the 1960s to the present, including structuralist, rhetorical, feminist, cognitive, and “unnatural” narratologies. Evaluation will be based on attendance and participation, three short papers (3 pgs each) that respond to specific readings, a conference paper (10 pgs) due at the end of term, and an abstract and bibliography in preparation for the conference paper.