ENGL 4420
Realism and its Discontents
Alicia Carroll
In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, the character Miss Prism defines the realist novel. Unwittingly critiquing her beloved genre she says, “The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” This class will focus in particular on the discontents of realism as they are presented in the nineteenth-century British novel. We will explore in particular the predominance of this plot line in nineteenth-century novels where “the bad” (read desirous, rebellious, or interesting) are often seriously disciplined (i.e. married) or written out of the plot (i.e., dead) by the novel’s end.
Requirements:
There will be one short paper, one longer research paper, a midterm and final examination.
Readings:
Our texts may include a variety of classics such as Austen’s Emma, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Gaskell’s North and South, Dickens’ Hard Times, Ouida’s Princess Napraxine, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We will strive to understand the work of realism, its link to power, and its general discontents by reading selections from a variety of critiques of realism such as Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction and Roland Barthes’ Reality Effect. Towards the end of the course we will also investigate some shorter examples of fantasy literature that responded to the dominant form of realism. These may include Mary de Morgan’s On a Pincushion and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince.

ENGL7740
British Literature and Culture: Outdoors in the Novel
Alicia Carroll
This course explores the greening of the nineteenth-century British novel within the cultural context of the industrialization of the nation. Our readings will focus on how as green space in England shrinks, representations of a green nation rise in realist fiction and in the production of cultural ephemera such as Victorian magazines like The Suburban Gardener. Of particular concern in the course will be how fictional representations of the outdoors and the “natural world” help shape what the novel works to construct as both “real” and “natural” in relations between genders, between classes, and between races. Organized thematically, the course will pair the study of material culture with the production of cultural narratives. For example, we will study industrialization and narratives of loss; practices of walking and riding and their conjunctions with narratives of rebellion or entitlement; subdivision, suburbs, and narratives of expansion and miniaturization; nostalgia and narratives of folly; early environmentalism and the river narrative. We will revisit issues passionately debated such as waste management, animal rights, rehabilitative gardening, and the formation of the National Trust and public parks.
Requirements:
One oral presentation and one seminar paper.
Readings:
Occasionally we may read key poems such as Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos,” Tennyson’s “Come Down O Maid,” or selections from In Memorium. But, the majority of primary texts will be novels. These may include a selection of texts from the following: Austen’s Mansfield Park, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Eliot’s Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, Gaskell’s North and South, Sewall’s Black Beauty, Ouida’s The Waters of Edera, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and or Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Our approach will be informed by the practices and theories of cultural studies. This will entail exploring a wide variety of critical and theoretical approaches. Critical works may include readings or selections from texts such as Roland Barthe’s “The Reality Effect,” Donna Landry’s The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831, Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, and the Souvenir, Margaret Homan’s Bearing the Word, both Raymond William’s The City and the Country and Donna Landry’s The City and the Country Revisited.