ENGL7031 · English

Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Prose, and Cultural Criticism

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Matthew Arnold famously wrote "Art is a criticism of life." Naguib Mahfouz has taken this astep further: "Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, artwould be meaningless and cease to exist." Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Prose, and CulturalCriticism will explore connections among three different modes of Victorian writing: poetry,cultural criticism, and life writing. Authors we will read include Elizabeth Barrett Browning,John Keble, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins,Matthew Arnold, Annie Besant, Margaret Oliphant, Harriet Martineau, John Ruskin, FlorenceNightingale, Matthew Arnold, Frederic Harrison, and Leslie Stephen, among others. It will try toexamine the buried positions and controversies in these works. Most important, it will try toexamine the struggles of these works in the marketplace, and within the vivid milieux ofVictorian intellectual and literary life, taking into account their reception and dissemination; theirinfluence of lack of it, and their nascent afterlives.