I have requested that you purchase suitable scholarly editions of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

Other texts will be available as links on the course website. I’m working on getting Wilde and Rhys held on reserve for you in the library.

We will also make use of supplemental primary sources, archival documents, and images throughout the semester. 

Primary Sources

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852)

George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856)

Charles Darwin, excerpts from Origin of the Species (1859)

Walter Pater, “Preface” and “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (1873)

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Secondary Sources

Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp3–40, pp165–172.

Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Marcus, Sharon. “At Home with the Other Victorians.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 119–145. 

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.