Students who pass the course satisfactorily will be able to:

--understand the Victorian novel in its particular context of nineteenth-century Britain

--distinguish the fictional features of the Victorian novels, including both more “canonical” texts of the period as well as popular works of the time.

--trace the novel’s status as a popular and mass-market genre, looking back to arguments about the eighteenth-century “rise of the novel” and forward to arguments about the modernist separation of elite culture and popular culture. 

--appreciate the contributions of women writers, genres, and audiences coded as feminine, and ideologies of gender to the novel’s success as a commodity and a market economy.

--produce insightful research papers on various aspects of the Victorian novel