8:7500 New Women, Decadent Men, and the Transition to Modernism

MW 3:30-4:50 467 English-Philosophy Building

 
Instructor: Florence Boos florence-boos@uiowa.edu;

http://victorianfboos.studio.uiowa.edu/courses
Office: 319 EPB, office phone 335-0434 (answering machine)

Office hours: 
MW 5-6 p. m.; Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons by appointment.

 

Course Information and Assignments

Texts to be Read:

George Gissing, The Odd Women (in UI bookstore)

George Moore, Esther Waters (ordered Oxford Classics edition from UI bookstore)

Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (in UI bookstore)

Mona Caird, “The Morality of Marriage” (online version blurred; will provide handout)

Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (in UI bookstore)

William Morris, The Tables Turned, morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/tablesturned.html

Vernon Lee, “A Wicked Voice” and “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” (handout)

Elizabeth Dobbs and Annie Wakeman, The Autobiography of a Charwoman, pdf. version

Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, Dawn’s Left Hand (in UI bookstore)

Poetry selections, Rosamund Marriot Watson, Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (in UI bookstore)

Penguin Poetry of the First World War, ed. George Walter (in UI bookstore)

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (ordered UI bookstore)

 

Course Requirements:

 

contributions to class discussion: please read the assignments carefully and come prepared for class discussion with questions and comments on important or unusual features of the text.

biographical background reports, leading of discussion: I will ask students to prepare information on two or more authors or texts and lead class discussions on some of our selections.

journal/reading responses: please prepare 6 reading responses, the equivalent of two double-spaced typed pages each, to be posted online so that your classmates may read them. Of these six, at least three should comment on or reply to a posting by one of your fellow students, and some should respond to or incorporate prior criticism on the topic. You should print these out at the end of the semester and leave them for me by December 16th.

final essay: In addition to posting these responses to the class web site, you will be asked to write an approximately twenty page critical/research paper, to be due along with your Icon postings December 16th, 2016. However you should choose a tentative topic by the end of Thanksgiving break and submit this to me shortly thereafter.

If you give me a first rough draft sometime in early December, I will return it with any suggestions in time for you to make revisions.

final exam equivalent: You will be asked to present a précis of the substance of your essay in class at the time voted on by the class during exam week Monday-Wednesday December 12th-14th, 2016.