This course will explore how Victorian literature tackles the self, sense and sensibility. We will look at the self in relation to Bildung, collective identity or otherness. We will also be considering the body, the senses and the sensual world in Victorian novels. We will look at ways in which Victorian literature explores the mind, and how it engages with affects and emotions. In order to do this, we will be analyzing excerpts from the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Georges Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
