Graduate lecture courses surveying broad areas and periods of literary history, and directing students in wide reading. Offerings vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

Great Britain in the nineteenth century: a multinational state commanding a worldwide commercial and colonial empire, much of it administered by private interests. This is also the "classical" era of the realist novel – a genre that pushed Britain’s global empire to the margins of its concern, as Edward Said famously noted, instead making “provincial life” (the subtitle of George Eliot's Middlemarch) the domain of national life and of a normative human nature. The seminar will consider Romantic-period national tales and historical novels on the Anglo-British Union by Irish and Scottish writers; Victorian novels of provincial and regional (i.e., English) life; and late-century imperial romance.

Book List:

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Walter Scott, Guy Mannering; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandamath; Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Repeat Rules