Department of English

The seminar will analyze the role of the infantile in Victorian narrative, especially narratives by male writers. We will try to locate the transition from infantilism to authority in such sages as Wordsworth, Ruskin, Dickens, Tennyson, and Hopkins. We will also, of course, study Narratives by such women as the Brontes, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who eschew infantilism even when they write about children.