Victoria’s Secrets
Known as the great age of the realist novel and the epitome of staid decorum, the nineteenth century also had its guilty pleasures--mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, adventure tales, and more--which exposed a radical underside to the Victorian imagination where norms of gendered, racial, and ethnic identity were called into question. In this course we will read both canonical realist novels and their non-traditional counterparts in an attempt to understand the productive interplay between these two seemingly disparate literary traditions. Authors may include: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others.