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8:225 Victorian Literature: New Women and Decadent Men

Assignments

M W 6:00-7:15, Room 212 EPB

Instructor: Florence Boos florence-boos@uiowa.edu

http://english.uiowa.edu/~boosf/225NewDecadent12/index.html

Office: 319 EPB, office phone 335-0434 (answering machine)

Office hours: most evenings after class until 8:30 p. m.; Wednesdays 3:30-5 p. m.

Texts:

Handouts of Victorian short stories by Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Margaret Oliphant and Arthur Morison; essays by Frances Cobbe and Eleanor Marx; and poems by Thomas Hardy, Arthur E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, W. E. Henley, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and women poets from the anthology Victorian Women Poets, ed. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds.

I will also provide a scan of Annie Wakeman, The Story of a Charwoman (Elizabeth Dobbs).

At UI Bookstore:

Gissing, George. The Odd Women.

Zangwill, Israel. Children of the Ghetto.

Grand, Sarah. The Beth Book.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.

Symonds, Emily. A Writer's Life.

Shaw, Bernard. Mrs. Warren's Profession.

Moore, George. Esther Waters.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere.

Course Requirements:

1. contributions to class discussion: please read the assignment carefully and come prepared to ask questions and comment on unusual features of the text.

2. I will also ask students to prepare information on authors or critical essays, or to lead class discussion on a text or part thereof.

3. journal/reading responses: please prepare 7 reading responses, the equivalent of two double-spaced typed pages each, to be posted on Icon so that your fellow students may read them. Of the seven, at least one should comment on some aspect of Victorian art or book design.

You should follow an informal schedule of posting at least one entry each two weeks.

4. In addition to posting these responses to the class web site, you will be asked to write a fifteen + page critical/research paper, to be due December 14th. However you should choose a tentative topic by Thanksgiving and give me a first rough draft by December 7th.

5. You will be asked to present a precis of the substance of your essay in class December 6th or 11th. Final essays are due December 14th, 2012.