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Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Writing Course Syllabus

Spring 2025

Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Writing

(Πεζογραφία 19ου Αιώνα, ΛΕ 169), 6^th  Semester, Elective

Course Description:

The course explores the development of nineteenth-century Anglophone writing by British, American and Canadian authors focusing on different genres. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Mark Twain’s and Edith Wharton’s travel accounts, Kate Chopin’s and Henry James’ s short stories, William Morris’s utopian socialist science fiction, and Joseph Conrad’s novella, all delineate different aspects of the Victorian Era. Emphasis is put on women’s writing and the variety of prose styles, while thematically the course focuses on the representations of the modern city, the presence/absence of women in the nineteenth-century public sphere, stereotypes in travel writing, class distinctions and labour-relations, the object/commodity in literature, utopian writing, imperial politics, but also peripheral voices (the English-Indian E. Pauline Johnson [Tekahionwake]. Students will concurrently explore the more theoretical essays of selected authors and the relevant critical scholarship. We will discuss the ways in which fiction reflects both the rapid social changes and the evolving views on gender, class, commodity culture, nation, imperialism, and civilization in the nineteenth century. Questions raised by the course include: What did the nineteenth century—with its particular social and economic conditions—bequeath to the study of literature? What does a literary work reveal about our understanding of the human subject in the modern world? How does nineteenth-century fiction reveal the multifarious factors that shape the characters’ identities and world views? How does a nineteenth-century author depict these factors in the chosen form of the short story, novella, novel, and travel account?

Course Objectives:

The course aims at:

• understanding and explaining what informs the production of fiction in the Victorian era; contextualising the text within its wider socio-economic frame. 
• thinking critically about the intersection of British literature with historical and cultural phenomena of the nineteenth century.
• employing methodological tools to critically read theoretical essays that discuss either the literary works under scrutiny or the nature and characteristics of the texts.
• exploring the nineteenth century literary past of fiction.
• familiarising students with Internet resources on the nineteenth century literature and history.

13-Week Syllabus

Week 1. 

Syllabus overview. What is Realism? Social Realism and 19th Century Fiction. The Victorian Era.

Terry Eagleton, “What is a Novel?” The English Novel. An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 8-21.

Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns”. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1887. 17-50.

Nochlin, Linda. “The Nature of Realism.” Realism. London: Penguin Books, 1971. 13-56.

Watch Jane Austen: The novel and social realism: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yzlIzpDQdFQ

Week 2. 

Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: “the novel without a hero” I

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters I-XV, pp. 1-170] and George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856).

Watch Epic History TV’s blow-by-blow account of the entire Waterloo campaign in 14 minutes, with animated maps and artwork, plus rarely seen photographs of survivors of Napoleon's army: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZGL1xsqzs.

Browse: The Victorian Web features several articles on Thackeray and the contexts of Vanity Fair: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wmt/index.html.

You might find the section on how currency values equate to modern values useful:

http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages.html.

Listen to “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx3bacrl-HQ.

Further Reading:

Capuano, Peter J. “At the Hands of Becky Sharp: (In)Visible Manipulation and Vanity Fair.”Victorians Institute Journal 38.1 (2008):167-191.

Curran, Stuart. “Women Readers, Women Writers.” Curran S, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. S. Curran. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 177-195.

Week 3. 

Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: “the novel without a hero” II

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters XVI-XXIV, pp. 171-269].

Further Reading:

Dobson, Kit. “‘An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name’: Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities of Rebecca and Amelia in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.” Victorian Review 32. 2 (2006): 1–25. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793597.

Linder, Christoph. “Thackeray’s Gourmand: Carnivals of Consumption in Vanity Fair”. Modern Philology 99. 4 (2002): 564-581. University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215617.

Week 4. 

Victorian Women and the Public Sphere: “the novel without a hero" III

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) [Chapters XXV-XXXV, pp. 270-422].

Browse: Kurt Harris's elegantly designed Thackeray site that includes a bibliography of twenty-first century secondary materials, list of works, and Thackeray chronology. https://sites.google.com/a/suu.edu/wmthackeray/.

Further Reading:

Robbins, Bruce. "Agency: The Servant as Instrument of the Plot". The Servant′s Hand, English Fiction from Below. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Miller, Andrew H. “Longing for Sleeve Buttons.” Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 14–49. 

Wiltse, Ed. “‘[T]he Shout of the Beef-Eating British’: Nation and Genre in ‘Vanity Fair.’” CEA Critic 67. 3, (2005): 41–64. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44377604. 20 Jan. 2024.

Week 5. 

The Modern Travel Essay: the case of Athens

Mark Twain’s 1869 “Chapter XXXII” in The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They appeared to the Author (337-353 in pdf) 

Edith Wharton’s 1888 The Cruise of the Vanadis (excerpts in pdf).

Further Reading:

AbuHilal Fatin. “The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: ‘The Positional Superiority’ of the American Identity in the Nineteenth-century Travel Narrative.” International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies ISSN 2202-9451 2. 4: (2014): 15-26. 

Week 6. 

Optional mid-term exam (60 mins). Emancipation and the Allure of the Commodity 

Kate Chopin, “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897) (https://www.katechopin.org/a-pair-of-silk-stockings/)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 663-671.

Browse: the website dedicated to Kate Chopin’s life and work and check out the categories: https://www.katechopin.org.

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5yALuJ5yFA.

Further reading:

Joslin, Katherine. “Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World”. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 73-86.

Taylor, Helen. “‘The perfume of the past.’ Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans.” The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 147-160.

Simmel, Georg. “Georg Simmel on Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62. 6 (1957):  541-558. The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2773129.

Week 7. 

The Problem of Representation: Labour, Art, Authorship

Henry James, “The Real Thing” (1892) and “The Art of Fiction” (1884).

Listen to the story here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vh5E7wcsr4g.

Further Reading:

Burrows, Stuart. “Stereotyping Henry James.” The Henry James Review 23. 3 (2002): 255-264. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2002.0017.

Whitsitt, Sam. “A Lesson in Reading: Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing.’” The Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 304-314. 

Simon, Linda. “The Captured Self: Problems of Portraiture in Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’”. LINQ Literature in North Queensland 40.1 (2013): 64-75. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/view/12/9.

Week 8. 

The Utopian Tradition I

William Morris, News from Nowhere. Ed. Krishan Kumar. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. CUP, 2002. (1890) [Chapters 1-17]

Listen to the novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_AffhuW7U

Further Reading:

Evans, Timothy. “William Morris, News from Nowhere.” https://www.academia.edu/105050456/William_Morris_News_from_Nowhere.

Week 9. The Utopian Tradition II

William Morris, News from Nowhere. Ed. Krishan Kumar. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. CUP, 2002. (1890) [Chapters 18-32]Further Reading:

Further Reading:

Boos, Florence S and William Boos. “News From Nowhere and Victorian Socialist-Feminism”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 14.1 (1990): 3-32.

Woody, Christine Marie. “The Newspaper and the Novel: William Morris’s News from Nowhere in Commonweal”. Victorian Periodicals Review 50. 1 (2017): 139-156. Project Muse.

Week 10. 

Imperial Visions: Feminizing the Colony 

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism‎. London: Vintage, 1994, 19-31.

Listen to Conrad’s text here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExK37zBmX8.

Further Reading:

Shaffer, Brian W. The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization. Massachusetts: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.

Straus, Nina Pelikan. “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 20. 2 (1987): 123–37. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1345873. 

Week 11. 

Imperial Visions: Colonialism, Race, Representation

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) 

Fanon, Frantz. “The Woman of Colour and The White Man.” Black Skin, White Masks. Transl. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 1967. 41-62.

Listen to Conrad’s text here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExK37zBmX8.

Further Reading:

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 8.4 (1977): 782-94.

Ngugi wa Thiong’O, “The Contradictions of Joseph Conrad.” Review of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff. The New Yorker, 21/11/2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/books/review/dawn-watch-joseph-conrad-biography-maya-jasanoff.html.

Cole, Sarah. “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44. 2 (1998): 251-81.

Week 12. 

The Native American Voice.

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), “The Organization of the Iroquois” (1898) http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/encyclopedia/PaulineJohnson-TheOrganizationoftheIroquois.htm

———, “As It Was In The Beginning” (1913) https://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/cst1030/1030anth/epauline.html.

———, “A Strong Race Opinion: On The Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” (1892) https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/a_strong_race_opinion.pdf?TSPD_101_R0=08d956b52bab20001e80f99e1b13c06d4197f0d98a6214c2baaca25550231314734d390d4e62bca70820b17ed114300008fb7bfd7180ccd7bc28ae09b0b52f413f20910d492e008d5bf59bd814da9e4ce1383dd4a773eae784d38168d2e0e029.

Further reading:

O’Neil, Lindsey E. R. “Creating Canada: Emily Pauline Johnson and the Dramatic Monologue.” Victorian Studies 62. 2 (2020): 208–12. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.62.2.07.

Week 13. 

Students Oral Presentations, Review of course material. Course Evaluation.

General Info

All primary and secondary material will be made available online through the e-class.

Requirements: Students are required to have read the material before each class. Active

participation is both encouraged and expected.

Assessment and Extra Credit: There are three ways to the final grade in this course: the final exam, the optional mid-term exam, and the optional oral presentations. The midterm exam will be taken in Week 7 and will cover Weeks 1-6. This is worth half the course grade. Students who decide to sit the mid-term exam will be asked to answer only one question at the final exam.

Class Presentations: In pairs or individually you can undertake a class presentation (for up to two extra points foreach student to be added to a passing grade from the final exam) which will develop one of the themes discussed in class. These presentations are scheduled for Week 13 and will be peer-reviewed by the class.

For the presentation students should

ï Discuss at least one of the primary literary texts studied and two secondary sources of your choice. Choose a topic/theme/or a particular extract from the studied texts and draw connections to the larger context of the course.

ï Look at your notes, but not passively read the whole thing.

ï Engage in serious academic research rather than use AI sources copy-pasting randomly what you find online.

ï Make a PowerPoint that includes references for all citations.

ï Prepare a 1-2 page handout in which you may include important quotations, topics covered, works consulted, and/or other relevant information.

ï Provide the instructor with a written version, which includes their main points (bullet points or notes) as well as the secondary sources they consulted and used.

Students will be assessed on extensiveness of research, use of secondary academic sources, coherence of your presentation, and manner of delivery.

Topics and primary sources should be sent to the instructor beforehand for approval and to make

sure your topics of choice do not overlap. A meeting will be arranged to discuss your topic and

sources before you start preparing.

Bibliography

AbuHilal Fatin. “The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: 'The Positional Superiority' of the American Identity in the Nineteenth- century Travel Narrative”, International Journal of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies ISSN 2202-9451 2. 4 (2014) 15-26. 

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The  Massachusetts Review 8.4 (1977): 782-94.

Boos, Florence S. and William Boos. “News From Nowhere and Victorian Socialist-Feminism”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 14.1 (1990): 3-32.

Burrows, Stuart. “Stereotyping Henry James.” The Henry James Review 23. 3 (2002): 255-264. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2002.0017.

Capuano, Peter J. “At the Hands of Becky Sharp: (In)Visible Manipulation and Vanity Fair.”Victorians Institute Journal 38.1 (2008):167-191.

Chopin, Kate. “A Pair of Silk Stockings.” (1897). https://www.katechopin.org/a-pair-of-silk-stockings/. 1-3. Web.

Cole, Sarah. “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44. 2 (1998): 251-81.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Web. https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Conrad/Heart_Darkness.pdf.

Curran, Stuart. “Women Readers, Women Writers.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. S. Curran. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 177-195.

Dobson, Kit. “‘An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name’: Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities of Rebecca and Amelia in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.” Victorian Review 32. 2 (2006): 1–25. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793597.

Eagleton, Terry. “What is a Novel?” The English Novel. An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 8-21.

Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review, vol. LXVI, October 1856, pp 442-461. George Eliot Archive. 

Engels, Friedrich. “The Great Towns”. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1887. 17-50.

Fanon, Frantz. “The Woman of Colour and The White Man.” Black Skin, White Masks. Transl. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 1967. 41-62.

Ferguson, Trish. “Machinations versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit.”” FATHOM [Online], 5 (2018): 1-11. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/795.

James, Henry. “The Real Thing”. The Real Thing and Other Tales. London: Macmillan and Co.,1893. 1-18.

Johnson, Emily Pauline. (Tekahionwake). “As It Was In The Beginning.” https://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/cst1030/1030anth/epauline.html. Web.

———. “The Organization of the Iroquois.” http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/encyclopedia/PaulineJohnson-TheOrganizationoftheIroquois.htm. Web. 

———, “A Strong Race Opinion: On The Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” (1892) https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/a_strong_race_opinion.pdf?TSPD_101_R0=08d956b52bab20001e80f99e1b13c06d4197f0d98a6214c2baaca25550231314734d390d4e62bca70820b17ed114300008fb7bfd7180ccd7bc28ae09b0b52f413f20910d492e008d5bf59bd814da9e4ce1383dd4a773eae784d38168d2e0e029. Web.

Joslin, Katherine. “Kate Chopin on Fashion in a Darwinian World.” The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 73-86.

Linder, Christoph. "Thackeray's Gourmand: Carnivals of Consumption in Vanity Fair.’" Modern Philology 99. 4 (2002): 564-581. University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215617.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 663-671.

Ngugi wa Thiong’O, “The Contradictions of Joseph Conrad.” Review of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff. The New Yorker, 21/11/2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/books/review/dawn-watch-joseph-conrad-biography-maya-jasanoff.html.

O’Neil, Lindsey E. R. “Creating Canada: Emily Pauline Johnson and the Dramatic Monologue.” Victorian Studies 62. 2 (2020): 208–12. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.62.2.07.

Payne, David. “The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialisation, and Vanity Fair.” The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Serialisation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 44-68.

Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism‎. London: Vintage, 1994. 19-31.

Shaffer, Brian W. The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization. Massachusetts: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.

Simmel, Georg. “Georg Simmel on Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62. 6 (1957):  541-558. The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2773129.

Simon, Linda. “The Captured Self: Problems of Portraiture in Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’”. LINQ Literature in North Queensland 40.1 (2013): 64-75. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/view/12/9.

Straus, Nina Pelikan. “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 20. 2 (1987): 123–37. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1345873. 

Taylor, Helen. “‘The perfume of the past.’ Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans”. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 147-160.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Vol. 1. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1917.

Twain Mark (Samuel L. Clemens). The Innocents abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They appeared to the Author. San Fransisco: H. H. Bancroft and Company, 1869.

Wharton Edith. The Cruise of the Vanadis. New York: Rizzoli, 2004.

Whitsitt, Sam. “A Lesson in Reading: Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing’.” The Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 304-314. 

Wiltse, Ed. “‘[T]He Shout of the Beef-Eating British’: Nation and Genre in ‘Vanity Fair.’” CEA Critic 67. 3, (2005): 41–64. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44377604.

Woody, Christine Marie. “The Newspaper and the Novel: William Morris’s News from Nowhere in Commonweal”. Victorian Periodicals Review 50. 1 (2017): 139-156. Project Muse.