Imagining Poverty in the Nineteenth Century
Dan Bivona profile
R 12-3
The discourse on poverty in the Victorian age is a class-bound discourse rooted in the assumptions of the (mainly) middle class intellectuals and writers who constructed it. In this course, we will be focussing on what poverty "means" to Victorians, rather than on what poverty "is"; that is, on how poverty came to be imagined, rather than on the objective condition of poverty in the first industrialized society. The novelists we will discuss span the Victorian period, from the flamboyant politician-novelist Disraeli to such nineties figures as Gissing and Morrison. Readings will be drawn from the novels of Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Morrison, and Gissing; from the reports of middle class "slummers" and the intellectuals such as Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor), Hector Gavin Sanitary Ramblings), Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, and Charles Booth; and from non-Victorian theorists, critics and historians such as Perkin, Himmelfarb, Althusser, Gramsci, Kristeva, Gallagher, and Stallybrass, and White. Requirements include 4 brief critical essays and one longer (15-page) final paper.
updated 2006-11-14
