Contextualizing the Novel in the Victorian Literature Classroom

Abstract

How does one fit the “loose baggy monster” that is the nineteenth-century novel within the confines of an undergraduate course in Victorian literature? Professors face such a question every academic year, as they struggle to balance the novel, nonfiction prose, poetry, and drama in all-inclusive Victorian period course. Gains and losses attend every choice, whether one chooses to focus on a single novel like Dickens’s Bleak House or to assign a variety of “shorter” fiction like Wuthering Heights or Cranford (all in an effort to give equal attention to the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, for instance). As the chapter ultimately contends, Victorian cultural studies offer a model for the integration of generically disparate material around questions of history, culture, and representation.