19th-Century British Fiction (357-0-20)

Topic

Crime and Punishment

Instructors

Elizabeth Mary Winter

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 212: Mon, Wed 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

In the Victorian detective novel, The Moonstone (1868), Rachel Verinder's diamond vanishes on the night of her eighteenth birthday. But who is real criminal in the story- the thief who lifted the jewel from Rachel's safe, or the British army officer who first stole it from a temple in India? This course examines the birth of the detective novel (as well as Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most famous detectives) in nineteenth-century popular fiction and asks how authors used themes of crime, detection, and punishment to make sense of their place in Britain's global empire. How did authors transform anxieties about British imperial violence and colonial rebellion into narrative suspense? How do detective logics render certain crimes visible? And how do they render others—especially those committed by the empire itself— invisible? Reading gothic, sensation and detective fiction alongside historical legal cases and newspaper reports, we will consider how fictional narratives and real-world reporting used shared rhetorics to define the limits of crime and justice, innocence and Englishness.

Evaluation Method

The course will include a final research paper which invites students to become detectives themselves—investigating the literary and historical representations of an imperial "crime" of their choice.

Class Materials (Required)

A selection of the earliest works of English crime fiction, including Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of Four" (1890). We will also consider a selection of twenty and twenty-first century fiction. Possible texts include H.G. de Lisser's Jamaican gothic, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929) and Abhir Mukherjee's Indian detective novel A Rising Man (2016).

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro