LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature:Victorian Decadence: British Literature of the 1890s
Many readers associate British literature of the 1890s with moral and aesthetic decadence, and the major literary output of the period confirms why. The most famous literary magazine of the period, The Yellow Book, set the tone with its devotion to naughty playfulness and rebellion. A great deal of the period's writing exhibits a not very subtle streak of transgressive writing and rejection of social and religious conformity, and it is fair to say that this attitude, glimpsed in a wide cross-section of poetry, novels, and plays, gives the whole period its glamor and frisson. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great Victorian novelists, ceased writing novels after critics lambasted Jude the Obscure (1895) as sexually immoral. William Butler Yeats began his career in the company of the Rhymers' Club, a group of aesthetes most of whose members are better remembered for their drug habits than their poetic output. Bram Stoker wrote his influential masterpiece, Dracula (1897), a melodramatic horror story that is equally paranoid about foreigners and that updated version of the succubus, the New Woman. Other writers, including George Gissing and George Bernard Shaw, dealt with the social unrest caused by the New Woman's challenge to reigning domestic hierarchies; Gissing's The Odd Women and Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession both appeared in 1893. And the man who towers over the decade like none other was of course Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the autobiographical De Profundis (written 1897; published 1905). Wilde's writings and life in many ways sum up a decade fraught with social and sexual upheaval; tried, found guilty, and imprisoned on charges of "gross indecency," Wilde was the man who ushered in a new age of truth-telling when he referred to "the love that dare not speak its name." Assignments for the course consist of one oral presentation; a prospectus and annotated bibliography; one long paper. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
