18th and 19th Centuries

Faculty and students working in British eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and culture host a joint workshop and frequently share course work, conversation, and research across the overlapping "long" eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (c. 1680-1830 and 1775-1910).  Eighteenth-century study offers strength in literary and intellectual history (with particular attention to political and aesthetic theory, gender and sexual politics, philosophy, and the novel); in the emergence of literature and other disciplines, scientific as well as humanistic, and the interrelations between academic and public culture; and in the relations between literary form and legal theory. 

Studying the British Nineteenth Century at the University of Chicago Department of English enables a student to delve both deeply and broadly in the literature, culture, and history of the Victorian period.  Courses centrally engaged with visual culture, popular culture, gender and domesticity, the constitution of disciplinary knowledge, politics and the consolidation of empire are regularly offered.  While faculty who specialize in the field mobilize historicist approaches of one kind or another (literary history, cultural history, intellectual history, genealogies of knowledge and affect), every scholar in the field enriches his or her inquiry with an array of critical and theoretical readings in Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism.

Primary Faculty

Timothy Campbell

James Chandler

Leela Gandhi

Elaine Hadley

Elizabeth Helsinger

Heather Keenleyside

W. J. T. Mitchell

Lawrence Rothfield

Robin Valenza

Associated Faculty

William Veeder (Emeritus)
 

Selected Courses

• Thinking and Acting in the Long Eighteenth Century
• On Beauty and Being Just in the Long Eighteenth Century
• The Eighteenth Century Public Sphere
• Visual Culture in the English Enlightenment
• Pornography: History, Theory, Text
• Yours Sincerely: Locating Truths
• Exoticism, Race, Sexuality, and Science in the 18th Century
• Commerce, Luxury, and Consumption in the Early Modern Era
• British Literary Culture 1750-1850
• John Locke in Historical Context
• The Sentimental
• Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Lyrical Ballads
• Radical Culture in the 1790s
• English Women Writers and the Politics of the 1790s
• Wordsworth’s The Prelude
• Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
• Lyric Forms from Blake to Hardy
• Narrative Point of View: Theory/Practice, Fiction/Cinema
• History and Fiction in 19th Century Britain
• The 19th Century British Novel
• The 19th Century Realist Novel
• Nineteenth Century British Gothic Fiction
• Victorian Women Writers
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• The Politics of Culture
• The Politics of Taste
• Victorian Childhood
• Victorian Liberalism: Institutions, Ideas, Literatures