ENC 1145 Topics in Composition
Section: 3318
Class Meetings: T 2-3; R 3 (Tuesdays 8:30-10:25 AM; Thursdays 9:35-10:25 AM)
Location: TUR 2342 (Turlington Hall)
Syllabus: Click here to view/download
Writing About Late-Victorian Serialized Fiction and Periodicals
The popular conception of a novel today is a book bound in one self-contained volume. However, many of the major canonical British texts from the early nineteenth century were published in three volumes, and by the middle and latter part of the 1800s, novels by authors such as Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells were not published as collected volumes until after they had been serialized over the course of several months or longer. Serialization is responsible for many Western storytelling conventions: cliffhangers at the end of chapters or sections in a book, for example, or shorter narratives that are part of a series, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. However, we no longer read these texts in a format that resembles their original publication.
In this course, we will read a selection of Victorian novels, series, short stories, and other texts that were first published in British periodicals in the late 1800s. We will also examine illustrations, cartoons, advertisements, and other materials that were printed alongside these texts in an effort to re-contextualize them. When possible, we will read the texts in facsimile editions or scans of the periodicals so that we may experience their original format as a Victorian reader would have done.
This course fulfills the 6000-word University Writing Requirement and the CLAS Composition (C) Requirement.
