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The program in nineteenth-century British literature at SIUC embraces a wide range of scholarly and critical approaches: literary history, critical theory, gender studies, and cultural contextualization.
Courses
In addition to the Core survey courses in English literature, which introduce undergraduates to the most important works from the nineteenth century, we regularly schedule upper-level courses in Romantic and Victorian poetry and prose. These include "English Romantic Literature" (Blake, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, and less well-known writers of the era); "Victorian Poetry" (Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Arnold, Fitzgerald, Clough, the Pre-Raphaelites, Kipling, and Hopkins); "Nineteenth-Century English Fiction" (the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, and others); and "Irish Literature Survey," which has a large nineteenth-century component. All courses in nineteenth-century British literature are scheduled so that undergraduates who wish to explore the period's variety of literary forms and interests will have ample opportunity to do so.
Special Topics Courses
A recent special topics course in nineteenth-century British literature is Professor Collins' "Art and Science in the English Romantic Era," an interdisciplinary undergraduate Honors seminar on the relations of literature, science, and painting in the era of Wordsworth, Davy, Constable, and Turner. Special topics courses offered by faculty in other areas of the English department may also include nineteenth-century writers. A forthcoming special topics course will be Professor McEathron's "The Romantic Essay."
Seminars
In addition to undergraduate and special topics courses, faculty in nineteenth-century British literature regularly schedule a range of graduate seminars which emphasize close, scholarly study of specialized areas. Each spring term such a seminar is offered (alternately) in Romantic and Victorian literature. Recent topics include Professor Collins's "Inscriptions of Reading in Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (the treatment of books and reading from Jane Austen's Emma to Hardy's Jude the Obscure), as well as seminars devoted exclusively to George Eliot, to the Brontës, and to "Jane Austen and the Victorians"; Professor McEathron's "Nature in Romantic Literature" (the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Clare alongside that of British peasant poets); and Professor McEathron's current "Wordsworth and Coleridge" (a comparative study of their poetic careers). Certain seminars embrace writers from both eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Britain (Professor Chandler's recent seminars in the Gothic novel and the Sensibility movement) or from both nineteenth-century America and nineteenth-century England (Professor Anthony's recent seminar in the Gothic). SIUC's program in Irish and Irish Immigration Studies also includes seminars which focus upon nineteenth-century literature. Recent examples are Professor Fanning's seminars in "Nineteenth-Century Irish and Irish-American Cultures" and "Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, 1845-1924." A recent seminar offered by Professors Fanning and McEathron took up the comparative study of Blake and Yeats, while Professors Collins and McEathron are planning a seminar on Wordsworth and George Eliot.
Recent PhD Dissertations
Robert E. Cason, "Shelley, Pindar, and the Ideology of the Ode."
Dolores A. Kiesler, "'Something Specific to Contribute': George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Challenges of Feminism."
John Michael Lillich, "Reading in Three Nineteenth-Century English Novels: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Romola, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure."
Carla Graham, "Counter Stress: The Response of the Artist to Christ in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins."
Robert Welsh, "The Tragic View of Life: George Eliot's Middlemarch and Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina."
Yu Zhang, "Chinese Translations of David Copperfield: Accuracy and Acculturation."
Timothy Ziegenhagen, "Reading the Book of Nature: Romantic Literature and Romantic Science from Wordsworth to De Quincey."
Recent MA Theses
Ruth Ballard, "George Eliot's Permutation in Character." Donna Dare, "Character in Theory and Practice: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice." Michael Given, "The Diary as Narrative Device in Wilkie Collins' Woman in White." Clint Stevens, "Creation and Re-Creation or Selfhood and Identity in Blake's Pickering Manuscript." Marjorie Winther, "Standing by Sarcastic: Humor in George Eliot's Adam Bede." Quiq-yun Wu, "Three Versions of Wordsworth's Michael: Archetype, Individualist, and Natural Man."
Faculty
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