This is the course site for Professor Williams’s course, The Nineteenth Century English Novel: Love, Desire and The Body.

The nineteenth century was an era marked by unprecedented change, from the expansion of Britain’s empire, to the move from a rural to industrial economy, to developments in science, transportation and technology, to anxieties of class, gender, race, religion and marriage. It was also the era that saw the blossoming of the novel as an art form. In this course, we are going to ask the question: what motivated the rise of the nineteenth-century English novel, and its various genres? Why did Victorians love reading novels? 

We are also going to consider the desires of the fictional bodies that populate the Victorian novel. What do the characters of these novels want – be it love, marriage, money, status, revenge, beauty, or power – and why? Which bodies are allowed to desire and how do these desires conform to, question or challenge Victorian beliefs and ideals? What are the consequences of these loves and desires, realized or unrealized? We will pay particular attention to raced, gendered and classed bodies – and bodies deemed mad, bad or dangerous – whose desires violate Victorian expectations and perhaps our own.  

I also invite you to draw on the lived experience of your own bodies as you read. We are not living in the world of the Victorians, but we do live with its long history and our own complex desires and relationships as human beings. What do these texts push us to grapple with in our present moment? What do they leave us wanting? 

Header image: Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, a watercolour from 1864, depicts the two female Greek poets in swooning embrace (Credit: Tate)