ENLT 342: Digital Victorians
Description
This course uses digital materials, tools, and methods to approach British literature, history, and culture related to a specific topic and/or time period within the Victorian era. Course texts include a selection of literary works (novels, short stories, poetry, and/or drama), nonfiction texts (essays, criticism, historical documents), and visual materials. Readings may vary across sections.
This course is offered roughly every other year, but readings and assignments may vary.
Spring 2023 Focus: British Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals
The Victorian fin de siècle (“end of the [nineteenth] century”) was a time of rapid and wide-ranging change for Britain: the sunset of the Empire, crucial innovations in technology, industry, and medicine, a women’s rights movement, and myriad other factors contributed to a historical moment of excitement and upheaval. These changes were chronicled in, and perpetuated by, the thousands of magazines and newspapers that Victorian Britons relied on for news, culture, and entertainment. In this class, we will examine novels, short stories, poetry, essays, illustrations, and other works published in British periodicals in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, as well as texts from the period that informed and were influenced by them. We will discuss not only the texts themselves, but also their material contexts, including the physical pages on which they were printed and the materials that surrounded them in their periodical environments. We will also explore and interrogate the ways in which digital resources, editions, and tools can aid, and sometimes hinder, our engagements with fin-de-siècle magazines and newspapers.
Syllabi
- Spring 2023 (as ENLT 384: Special Topics in English Literature – Digital Victorians)
- Spring 2021 (as ENLT 284: Special Topics in English Literature – Victorian Voices)
For links to example projects by students in this course, see the Student Projects page.
