ENGL 353 B1: Late Victorian Texts

E. Kent

From Sherlock Holmes, through vampires and serial killers, to steampunk, our contemporary culture remains fascinated with the Victorian period. This course is organized around the following question: what is it about the Victorian response to social change makes it so appealing to artists, writers, and filmmakers today? To answer the question, we will study a range of late-Victorian texts as well as the contexts out of which they emerged. In the last two weeks of the course, we will consider more recent incarnations of the Victorian, through both adaptations and neo-Victorian inventions across multiple media.