The Victorian age represents the final stage of what a growing number of scholars have come to call "middle modernity": the eighteenth and nineteenth century period that gives birth to mass literacy, ideas of human rights (including women's rights and children's rights), industrialization, imperialism, secularization. This course explores the literary culture of Victorian era in conjunction with this emerging modernity, paying special attention to literature that deals explicitly or implicitly with these themes, but also showing how this tendency shapes many of our received notions about the meaning of literature itself. One may expect readings from Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Mona Caird, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde.