English 256n: The Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice
Spring 2004
Emerson 106
M 3-5
Professor Leah Price
Office hours: T Th 2:30-3:30
Barker 271
6-0573
Feb. 9: Introduction
[Feb. 16 UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY]
Feb. 23 Austen, Emma (1816)
*Dorrit Cohn, from Transparent Minds (1978; excerpted in McKeon, 493-514)*Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957), 290-301.
*D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (2003), 32-56
March 1 Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), volume 1
*[Robert Lamb,] "The Manufacturing Poor" (Fraser's, January 1848)*Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect" (1968)
*George Gissing, "The Place of Realism in Fiction" (1929)
*"Realism," in Williams, Keywords (1976)
March 8 Mary Barton, complete
*Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles" (1956)*Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35)
*Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), 53-56
*RECOMMENDED: Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), 62-87
March 15 Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848), through chapter 33
PLEASE NOTE: CLASS MEETING IN HOUGHTON LIBRARY
*Simon Eliot, "The Business of Victorian Publishing" (2001)*Trollope, "The Higher Education of Women" (1868)
*Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader (1996), 3-21
March 22 Vanity Fair (complete)
*Lukacs, Preface to Studies in European Realism (1948)*Eliot, from Adam Bede (1859)
[SPRING BREAK]
April 5 Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), chapters 1-40
*[Walter Bagehot,] "Charles Dickens," National Review 7 (October 1858)*"Charles Dickens and David Copperfield," Fraser's 42 (December 1850)
*James Fitzjames Stephen, "The License of Modern Novelists," Edinburgh Review 106 (1857): 124-56.
*Stephen,"The Relation of Novels to Life," Cambridge Essays (1855) 148-92.
*Dickens, Prospectus inserted in Dombey and Son, March 1847
April 12 David Copperfield, complete
*from Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)*RECOMMENDED: Mary Poovey, from Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988)
April 19 Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), through book 4
*Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (1856)*Hillis Miller, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch" (1975)
April 26 Middlemarch, complete
*Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884)
May 3 *** AT 6:30 pm***: Dinner and presentation of final paper projects
Requirements
- An oral presentation (sign-up sheet to be circulated in the second class meeting): Each member of the seminar will take responsibility for guiding the terms of discussion in his or her chosen week, collaboratively if numbers warrant. You should introduce the class with a 10-minute presentation summarizing those points in one or more of the secondary readings (Victorian or modern) which strike you as particularly relevant, proceed to draw connections between those readings and the primary text being read this week, and finally identify a series of questions for the seminar to discuss. Because these presentations function as a springboard to the discussion, they should be informal in style and spoken rather than read. Depending on the week's material, you may find it helpful to distribute a sheet of quotations from the texts under discussion, or an outline of the questions that you'd like to raise, or any other handout that strikes you as pedagogically useful.
- Weekly postings to the seminar listserv: a brief email (under a page) raising questions you'd like discussed in class, drawing seminar members' attention to points in the primary or secondary readings that would repay further analysis, connecting the current week's reading with issues discussed earlier in the semester, or sketching out working hypotheses for a paper topic. At a minimum, you should post one such email to the class list at some point before 3PM Sunday; you should also feel free to use the listserv to respond to others' postings, which you should print out and read before class. Because these papers are designed as preparation for seminar discussion, they should deal with the upcoming week's readings (not with the readings that have been discussed in the previous session); for the same reason, the 3:00 deadline is absolute. You don't, however, need to post to the listserv in the week when you're leading discussion.
- A final paper, due Wednesday May 19 by 4:00 in my box: between 4,000 and 7,000 words (counting endnotes) on a topic of your own choosing. Please note that both wordlimit and date are firm (no incompletes).
- A proposal for the final paper topic, to be presented and discussed at the last meeting of the semester (May 3).
Books available at the Coop:
Austen, Emma, ed. Stephen Parrish (Norton)
Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Macdonald Daly (Penguin)
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Peter Shillingsburg (Norton)
Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Penguin)
Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Penguin)
Please buy these specific editions (unless you already own, and have heavily annotated, another copy) to ensure that everyone can refer to the same page numbers in discussion.
Starred readings on the syllabus are contained in the coursepack, available at Gnomon Copy; you should buy a copy before the second class meeting.
Some Suggestions for Further Reading
The most compendious recent anthology of novel theory is Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000); you'll probably want to buy this if you plan to work on the novel as a genre. Martin McQuillan's Narrative Reader (London: Routledge, 2000) is worth a look if you're particularly interested in structuralist and post-structuralist narratology, but focuses more on narrative as a mode than on the novel as a genre.
Foundational texts of Victorian novel theory that you may find it interesting to browse through include:
David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1859)
Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859)
E.S. Dallas, The Gay Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866).
However, the most interesting writing on fiction in this culture tended to take the form of periodical essays, most often reviews; an intelligently structured anthology of short excerpts from Victorian reviews of novels and essays on the novel is David Skilton, ed., The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (London: Routledge, 1993), now out of print. Several collections of essays reprinted in full (also out of print) are worth browsing:
A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1830-1900, ed. John Charles Olmstead (New York: Garland, 1979)
Victorian Fiction: A Collection of Essays from the Period, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel (New York: Garland, 1986)
Victorian Criticism of the Novel, ed. Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth (Cambridge UP, 1985).
Anthologies of reviews of the individual novelists read for this course (convenient as a bibliographical starting-point, although truncated too drastically to give much sense of the genres of Victiorian novel criticism) include
Jane Austen: the Critical Heritage, ed. B.C. Southam (London: Routledge, 1968).
Thackeray: The Critical Heritage, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes (London, 1968).
Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971).
George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (London: Routledge, 1971).
Useful reference books on Victorian culture include
Brantlinger, Patrick, and William B. Thesing. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. (panoramic and up-to-date; gives a useful taxonomy of subgenres of the novel)
Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (fewer entries than Blackwell's, but especially strong on reading and publishing)
Adam Roberts, Victorian Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary (London: Arnold, 2003) (less browsable than the above, but useful for quick fact-checking)
John Sutherland's lively Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford UP, 1988) remains unsurpassed for information about publication and reception of fiction, as well as highly readable plot summaries of sometimes unreadable novels.
Some useful electronic resources on the novel and on Victorian culture:
The Victoria Research Web.http://victorianresearch.org/
The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/
Mitsuharu Matsuoka's Victorian Web Sites. http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Victorian.html
Alan Liu's Victorian Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2751
The Dickens Page.http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Dickens.html
The Dickens Project.http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html
Jane Austen Page. http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeinfo.html
Literature On-line: http://80-lion.chadwyck.com.ezpl.harvard.edu: site linking to full text for most canonical literary works in English, plus full text of reference works including Encyclopedia of the Novel (ed. Schellinger) and Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (which, despite its title, is highly useful for the formal study of narrative prose).
English 256: coursepack
Bagehot, Walter, "Charles Dickens," National Review 7 (October 1858): 458-486.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 259-422.
Barthes, Roland, "The Reality Effect," The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 141-148.
"Charles Dickens and David Copperfield," Fraser's Magazine 42 (December 1850): 698-710.
Cohn, Dorrit, "Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction," Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 439-514.
Dickens, Charles, Prospectus inserted in Dombey and Son, March 1847.
Eliot, George, Adam Bede, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Penguin Books, 1980) 221-230.
Eliot, George, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 140-163.
Eliot, Simon, "The Business of Victorian Publishing," The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 37-60.
Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958) 52-56.
Gallagher, Catherine , The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985)
62-87
Gissing, George, "The Place of Realism in Fiction," George Gissing on Fiction (London: Enitharmon Press, 1978) 84-86.
Jakobson, Roman, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," Critical Theory Since Plato. ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992) 1041-1044.
James, Henry, "The Art of Fiction," The Critical Muse, ed. Roger Gard (London: Penguin Books, 1987) 186-206.
Lamb, Robert, "The Manufacturing Poor," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country (January 1848): 1-16.
Lukacs, Georg, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (London: The Merlin Press, 1972) 1-19.
Miller, D.A., Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) 31-56.
Miller, J. Hillis, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch," The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press,1975) 125-145.
Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 89-125.
Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help (Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Co., 1884) 21-26.
Stephen, James Fitzjames, "The License of Modern Novelists," Edinburgh Review 106 (July 1857): 124-156.
Stephen, James Fitzjames, "The Relation of Modern Novels to Life," CambridgeEssays (London: John Parker, 1855) 148-192.
Stewart, Garrett, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 3-21.
Trollope, Anthony, "The Higher Education of Women," Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1938) 68-88.
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) 290-301.
Williams, Raymond, "Realism," Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 256-263.