In the Victorian literary marketplace, fictions abounded in the form of romances, short penny-press papers, lurid newspaper accounts and sensation fiction. The Victorian reader would have noticed, say, similarities between the tales of adultery and bigamy in the newspaper and tales of adultery and bigamy in his or her favorite novel. These simultaneous fictions were often competing for readers and competing for claims to “the truth.” In this course, we will take a look at many different examples of Victorian fictions, paying particular attention to the ways in which these fictions rear their heads in several novels of the time period. In order to pursue this, we will focus on England’s most famous literary family: In reading the major works of Charlotte, Emily and Ann Brontë, we will seek to understand them as individual writers and their novels as complicated amalgamations of different types of fictions. We will begin by reading some of the Brontë sisters’ earliest writing (often referred to as the juvenilia) as a means of understanding their literary beginnings. From there, we will move on to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which is often thought of as a bildungsroman. We’ll complicate this notion by pairing the novel with a particular type of erotica that is concerned specifically with the figure of the governess. From there we will read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which will be paired with other, shorter gothic tales of depravity and misery. Our final novel will be Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which we will read alongside sensationalized accounts of domestic abuse and reform texts.

In this course, we will seek to make connections between these older types of fictions and contemporary fictions as well, as a means of establishing a line of continuity. (For example, after reading Jane Eyre, we will take a look at excerpts from The Nanny Diaries.) Each novel will be paired with a set of critical texts that will provide a variety of theoretical perspectives. At the beginning of the quarter, students will be responsible for choosing one of these critical texts and will lead a discussion on that text in small groups. Because this is a W course, students will be required to produce a significant amount of thoughtful, academic writing that is revised in response to instructor comments. There will be a required 5-page mid-term essay, as well as a final 5-page essay. Each essay must incorporate at least one of our major course texts as well as two critical sources. In addition to these two essays, students will be asked to submit weekly postings on Go-Post and will engage in a variety of shorter writing projects over the course of the quarter.

Book List:
*Course pack at Ave Copy (critical materials, juvenilia, etc.)
*Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin Classics, 2006. ISBN: 0141441143
*Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Editions, 2002. ISBN: 0393978893
*Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. OUP, 2008. ISBN: 0199207550