Programs and Areas

British Romantic and Victorian Literature Area

Nineteenth-Century British Literature offers scholars and students the opportunity to explore a variety of literary genres and gain an understanding of a dynamic body of literature that was written during a period in which far-reaching cultural changes were taking place. The writers of the age were reacting to--and contributing to--such historical and cultural events as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of nationalism, the struggle for women's rights, the struggle to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the growth of science, the crisis of religious faith, the struggle for Irish independence,and the growth of--and resistance to--the British Empire. It was the age of Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, Toussaint L'ouverture, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, and Oscar Wilde--to name just a few of the cultural icons of the period.

Nineteenth-Century British Literature is traditionally divided into the Romantic and the Victorian periods. Although literary historians continue to debate when the Romantic era begins and ends, the Victorian period is usually identified by the dates of the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901.

The program has an active and diverse community of faculty and graduate students who participate in workshops, reading groups, and other department and university-wide activities.

English Faculty

• Amanpal Garcha, Assistant Professor
• Marlene Longenecker, Associate Professor

Web Resources

• Voice of the Shuttle -- Voice of the Shuttle, an annotated guide to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet
• A Nineteenth-Century British Timeline -- A literature timeline from 1719 - 1918
• Romantic Circles -- Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Web site devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.
• Romantics Unbound -- Romantics Unbound is a Romanticism studies online learning and research site, connecting scholars, teachers, and students to a wealth of Romanticism material available on the Internet.
• Romanticism On the Net -- Romanticism on the Net is an International Refereed Electronic Journal devoted to British Romantic studies.
• The William Blake Archive -- A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sun Microsystems and Inso Corporation. With past support from the Getty Grant Program and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
• The Victorian Women Writers Project -- The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
• Victorian Web -- The Victorian Web is a project funded in part by the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore.
• Victorians Institute -- An organization of scholars and students centered in the Mid-Atlantic Region of the USA.
• Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA) -- the MVSA's principal purpose has been to foster new understandings and appreciations of the Victorians by hosting an annual conference and by otherwise encouraging and facilitating scholarly exchange, collaboration, and publication.
• American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) -- The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is an interdisciplinary group dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in all aspects of the period . . . from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century.
• The Tate Gallery -- Tate's mission is drawn from the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act, which is to increase public knowledge, understanding and appreciation of British art from the sixteenth century to the present day and of international modern and contemporary art.

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