Department of English

What motivates the study of the nineteenth century today? Recent shifts in Victorian studies—geared variously toward decolonizing and undisciplining, strategic presentism, and comparative, transnational, or transimperial approaches—have reframed the period and the field. What is gained and lost by shifting from “Victorian” as a rubric to a “long” or a “wide” nineteenth century? Thinking about the era’s theories of itself and about the different historical conditions that made Victorian culture such an intriguing object of study in the postwar U.S. in particular, and reflecting on both from the vantage point of more recent shifts in the world system, how might we understand the field in the crosscurrents among these moments? What narratives of the period, what genealogies of the present, and what discontinuities and lost episodes do past and present scholarship offer? What contributions to queer and feminist theory, to race and empire studies, and to literary history and novel theory does a global nineteenth century make possible? What premises might it revise? In this graduate seminar we will survey and reflect on the field as we read nineteenth-century literature, science, history, art criticism, and social theory along with old and new scholarship by Raymond Williams, C.L.R. James, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, D.A. Miller, Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Lisa Lowe, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy Wong, Sukanya Banerjee, Dustin Friedman, Nasser Mufti, Jessie Reeder, Robert Aguirre, and more. This course is open to MA and Ph.D. students. Submatriculated MA students should contact the course instructor to request permission to enroll and should submit a permit request via Path@Penn. This course is not suitable for advanced undergraduates.