The course explores a major "Victorian value"--liberal individualism--that remains part of the cultural currency, whether higher or lower in estimation, in subsequent times and our own. We begin with a brief reading from Samuel Smiles, popular expositor of "self-help." Thomas Carlyle serves as spokesman for a liberal progressivist Romantic strain that makes the individual a "Voluntary Force" for self-creation and creation of cultural and material realities. J. S. Mill serves as spokesman for a liberal Utilitarian and capitalist strain that justifies "self-interest" driving worldly production. Such strains are usually considered as more distinct and at odds than in their presentation in this course, based on recent scholarship by Philip Connell and on my own current work. Whatever the mix of influences, this Victorian value informs fictions by Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, making their works studies in and test cases for individuality and its development. One test or question is how individualism may, or may not, apply to women or members of the working class? another (more briefly treated due to limits of time for encompassing so large a subject) is how individualism in Britain squares with rule of others in Britain's vast empire? A follow-up question is, just how liberal is Victorian liberal individualism? It comes under critique in selected readings by Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Engels, each of whom, in different ways, places social cohesion and self-subordination to culture, set literary standards, state, or community in opposition to unleashed "Doing As One Likes." Finally, the course traces Victorian liberal individualism to a kind of apotheosis and exploding point in Art for Art's Sake with Oscar Wilde's advice to "multiply our personalities."

Readings feature discursive prose--social and literary/cultural criticism--and fiction, with selected poems, and a play. Key texts: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (with background report on 1 or more Romantic sources); Mill, "On Liberty" with brief readings in Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (and background report on Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism); Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass; Eliot, Daniel Deronda; Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Arnold, "Doing As One Likes" from Culture and Anarchy, "The Study of Poetry," "The Buried Life," and several more poems; Engels, ch. from Condition of the Working Class in England; Wilde, "The Critic As Artist," and (time permitting) "The Importance of Being Ernest." Background handbook: Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period, The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830-1890.

Requirements are on-going seminar participation, 5-min. "historical brief," leading discussion of a primary text or report on a secondary background reading (25%); "response" paper on a primary text (7-8 pp., 25%); seminar paper (may build on shorter paper if you choose, @12pp., 50%).