A brief note: My Victorian literature exam list focuses on texts that work within the gothic mode. Texts may be removed. I’ve also included some literary criticism in order to concentrate my readings on schools of thought that interest me.
I am blogging my notes as I take them and will link each texts to its corresponding notes.
Questions for Guiding Discussion
Novels and Short Stories
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818/23/31)
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)
Sir Walter Scott
“The Tapestried Chamber” (1828)
Unknown, probably James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest
The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846/7)
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair (1848)
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre (1847)
Villette (1853)
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Anne Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Charles Dickens
Hard Times (1854)
Our Mutual Friend (1865)
Elizabeth Gaskell
“The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852)
“Lois the Witch” (1859)
“The Grey Woman” (1861)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
“The Haunted and the Haunters” or “The House and the Brain” (1859)
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White (1860)
The Moonstone (1868)
George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Middlemarch (1872)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Anthony Trollope
The Way We Live Now (1875)
Olive Schreiner
The Story of an African Farm (1883)
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
“The Body Snatcher” (1884)
H. Rider Haggard
King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four (1890)
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892)
“The Adventure of the Final Problem” (1893)
“The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893)
William Morris
News from Nowhere (1890)
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan (1890/94)
“The Inmost Light” (1894)
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
H.G Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
“The Truth About Pyecraft” (1903)
“The Empire of the Ants” (1905)
Bram Stoker
Dracula (1897)
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness (1899)
Rudyard Kipling
The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888)
Kim (1901)
Algernon Blackwood
“Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House” (1906)
“The Willows” (1907)
DRAMA
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
PROSE
Thomas De Quincey
“On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” (1827)
Thomas Carlyle
from Past and Present (1843): “Midas,” “Gospel of Mammonism,” “Labor,” “Democracy,” and “Captains of Industry”
John Ruskin
from The Stones of Venice (1851-53): “The Nature of the Gothic”
Frederick Engels
from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845): “Preface,” “Introduction,” “The Industrial Proletariat,” “The Great Towns,” and “Competition”
Charles Darwin
from On the Origin of Species (1859): “Struggle for Existence” and “Recapitulation and Conclusion”
from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty (1859)
Matthew Arnold
“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864)
John Henry Cardinal Newman
from Apologia Pro Vita Sua: “Note A. Liberalism” (1864)
Karl Marx
from Capital: Volume I (1867, translated 1887)
POETRY
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Mariana” (1830) “The Lady of Shalott” (1832) “The Lotos-Eaters,” (1832) “The Palace of Art” (1832, revised 1842) “Ulysses” (1842) In Memoriam A.H.H (1850) “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)
from Idylls of the King (1869): “The Coming of Arthur,” “The Holy Grail” and “Guinevere”
Robert Browning
“Porphyria’s Lover” (1836) “My Last Duchess” (1842) “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842) “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) “Love Among the Ruins” (1855) “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855) “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864)
from The Ring and the Book (1868-69): Book I
Emily Bronte
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“The Cry of the Children” (1843) “To George Sand: A Desire” (1844) “To George Sand: A Recognition” (1844) “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1850)
from “Aurora Leigh” (1856): Books II and V
from “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (1850): #13: “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech,” #24: “Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,” #28: “My Letters! All dead paper mute and white,” # 38: “First time he kissed me, he but only kissed,” #43: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Jenny” (1848, 1870) “The Blessed Damozel” (1850) “The Burden of Ninevah” (1856) “Eden Bower” (1869)
Matthew Arnold
“Isolation, To Marguerite” (1849, 1857) “The Buried Life” (1852) “Philomela” (1853) “The Scholar Gipsy” (1853) “Dover Beach” (1867) Christina Rossetti “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856) “Goblin Market” (1862) ‘The Convent Threshold” (1862) “Song (‘When I am dead, my dearest’)” (1862) “Remember” (1862) “Winter: My Secret” (1862)
George Meredith
Selections from “Modern Love” (1862)
Algernon Charles Swinburne
“The Triumph of Time” (1866) “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) “Anactoria” (1866) “The Leper” (1866)
Augusta Webster “A Castaway” (1870) “Circe” (1870) from “Mother and Daughter” Sonnet Cycle (1895): #1: “Young laughters, and my music! Aye till now,” #2: “That she is beautiful is not delight,” #3: “I watch the sweet grave face in timorous thought,” #6: “Sometimes, as young things will, she vexes me,” #10: “Love’s Counterfeit,” #11: “Love’s Mourner”
Amy Levy
“Xantippe” (1881) “Epitaph (On a Commonplace Person Who Died in Bed)” (1884) “A Minor Poet” (1884)
Rudyard Kipling
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899)
CRITICISM
Patrick Brantlinger
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988)
Allen MacDuffie
Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014)
Jesse Oak Taylor
The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016)
Emily Steinlight
Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (2018)
Victorian Literature List by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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