This course will look at literary representation of the late- Victorian city. Following the rise of industrial capitalism, the metropolis came to represent a space of economic promise and individual mobility, as well as social instability and uncertainty. More than just the setting for a story, the Victorian city played an integral role in the formation of new and often contradictory narratives on democratic individualism and social conflict. We will look at how Victorian writers employed innovations in both form and content to represent these complex relationships and the modern subjectivities who occupy this new urban landscape. Reading from a representative sampling of texts (including the industrial novel, gothic fiction, new women writings, and naturalist narratives), we will ask who has access to these urban spaces and focus our conversations specifically on representations of class, gender, and nationhood. Our conversations and presentations will concentrate on representations of class and economic mobility in authors like George Gissing and Arthur Morrison; gender and sexual politics in city stories by authors like Margaret Harkness and Oscar Wilde; and nationhood and cosmopolitanism in works by authors like RL Stevenson and George Egerton. There will also be a final unit on the neo-Victorian city, featuring work by Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet) and Peter Ackroyd (Dan Leno) on the queer and working-class Music Hall; and we will also look at new media approaches to the Neo-Victorian city—including video games (Assassin’s Creed Syndicate or Vampyr) and film or television adaptations (Penny Dreadful and The Limehouse Golem).
Contextual and theoretical readings on the city and urban subjectivities will likely include (but not be limited to) selections from Marx & Engels, Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Certeau, Lefebvre, Saskia Sassen, and David Harvey.
