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This course has two main objectives: first, to provide an in-depth and intensive introduction to Victorian poetry; second, to examine the ways in which Victorian poetry responded to, contested, refashioned, and defied theories of the aesthetic--of the relations among art, the social good, truth, beauty, and value--that were themselves undergoing change and debate during the Victorian era (1830s-1900s). Our goal will be to place Victorian poetry as an agent of and as a response to the larger debates in aesthetics that literary and intellectual historians have identified in the period: productivist and consumerist theories of art and political economy; the politics of art for art's sake; cyclical, apocalyptic, and teleological conceptions of art's role in history; and republican and socialist political aesthetics. Through readings in aesthetic theory (including Ruskin, Pater, Bosanquet, Allen, Wilde), examinations of related visual arts (for example, paintings by Rossetti, Turner, and Whistler), and most especially sustained and rigorous close readings of poetry, we will explore the diversity and depth of Victorian poets' engagement with the artistic, social, and political landscape of Britain in the nineteenth century. Because this course treats questions of poetics as historically grounded and politically inflected, and as advancing ideas about aesthetics, some prior experience with poetry and poetics is an absolute must.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: ENGL201 OR ENGL288 OR ENGL226
Last Updated on MAR-21-2005
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459