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.

We are an active and diverse community of faculty and graduate students who participate in workshops, reading groups, and other department and university-wide activities. Although Nineteenth-Century British Literature is normally separated into the Romantic and the Victorian periods, most of our faculty have taught and published in both fields. Further, as Romanticists, our expertise extends well back into the eighteenth century and as Victorianists, well forward into the twentieth, so that we strive for an understanding of literary history that transcends the historical distinctions traditionally made in subdividing the study of English literature. And yet further, because we all teach and write about a variety of genres, we also transcend the sometimes limiting perspectives of scholars who focus solely on fiction, or poetry, or the essay. These genres include science fiction and fantasy, detective fiction, and serialized fiction.

Not only does our faculty provide flexibility across historical periods and genres, but we also have much to offer to overlapping areas of study in the Department: narrative studies, feminist criticism, gender and sexuality studies, and studies in popular and mass culture. In pursuing all of these varied interests, however, our coherence and institutional identity are grounded in our shared interest in the historicist and cultural materialist study of nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

English Faculty

• Noah Comet, Assistant Professor
• Virginia Cope, Associate Professor
• Jill Galvan, Assistant Professor
• Amanpal Garcha, Associate Professor
• Marlene Longenecker, Associate Professor
• Sean O'Sullivan, Assistant Professor
• David Riede, Professor
• Clare Simmons, Professor
• Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Associate Professor
• Leslie Tannenbaum, 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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