English 203

Book List

Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man; Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species; Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda; Eliot, George: Middlemarch; Eliot, George: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings

Description

A study of the Victorian novel in relation to nineteenth-century theories of natural and aesthetic form, focused on major writings by George Eliot and Charles Darwin. We will read two novels -- Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda – by Eliot, the novelist most attuned to contemporary developments in the natural and human sciences, together with selections from Eliot’s essays, reviews, and translations; a third novel expressing a rival aesthetic, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend; the two major works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote for a general public as well as for specialists, along with excerpts from his Beagle journal and other writings; and selections from writings on aesthetics and the philosophy of science by Friedrich Schiller, William Whewell, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, F. Max Müller, and E. B. Tylor.

This course satisfies the Group 4 (19th Century) requirement.