“Futures Past”
How did the Victorians view themselves in relation to history and the recent past—and how did they envision the future? How might we understand our contemporary moment in relation to the “long nineteenth century”? In their call to reimagine Victorian Studies for the twenty-first century, the V21 Collective asserts, “we are Victorian, inhabiting, advancing, and resisting the world they made.” As we explore how Victorian writers and thinkers theorized their relationship to their own contemporary moment, we’ll trace Victorian culture’s emergence as an object of study and how our own cultural moment remains shaped by works of nineteenth-century literature remediate the past and speculate about the future. Readings will include gothic, speculative, and historical fiction by Mary Shelley, William Morris, and Richard Jeffries and others, poetry by Tennyson, Browning, and Hardy, and neo-Victorian writing A.S. Byatt and Jennifer Higgie.
Dr. Hannah LeClair
T/Th 9:30–10:45 am, in-person
Course poster for ENG 4880, Victorian Literature: Futures Past, with Dr. Hannah LeClair: a Pre-Raphaelite painting of three pale, red-haired figures with closed eyes leaning together, against a star-flecked teal sky.
