|503||Victorian England: Anxiety and Aspiration||Butwin||TTh
9:30-11:20| I could have said “Hopes and Fears” but those vague
aspirates (phonetic sense) emerged first. In either case the
apparent contrast comes with a simple premise: that hopes and
fears, anxiety and aspiration, emerge from the same source.
Utopian hopes are inspired by the same stimuli that inform most
dystopias. Each reveals the other, and each will give us access
to the common culture of a period. Attached to this unremarkable
premise may be the open question of what the common culture
shares—or fails to share—with individual impulses. Central
texts: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) John Stuart
Mill On Liberty (1859) and On the Subjection of Women (1869). We
will read selections from major texts on either side of Dickens
and in order to explore the premise and the ancillary question
while we track the broad outlines of Victorian England. The
crises surrounding the urgent modernization of England in the
1860s feed fin de sičcle fa