This course will help students develop a critical approach to fiction. Students will learn to place literary texts within a certain line of inquiry, and articulate their contribution through close reading and analysis. Towards this end, we will focus on a specific set of texts produced during a historical moment: the long 19th century. From tyrannical abuses of power to anti-Semitism, 19th-century British literature targeted a range of social and political ills, and writers often sought to produce in their readers some sort of moral change through an affective representation of these wrongs. A specific point of departure within the broad theme of social critique will therefore be the role emotions play in this regard. We’ll be looking not only at how certain problems were represented in literature, but at the way such emotions as anger, fear, shame and sympathy position the texts within broader discourses on these topics. Students will also learn to work with secondary criticism and current critical theory in order to place their ideas within a larger scholarly framework. Required readings will include: William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth; Charles Dickens, Hard Times and Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, as well as a course packet.