LITR348

(Formerly LITR 342) Britain under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), transformed itself into the first urban, industrial, technological, democratic, and imperial modern state. Writers -- men and women alike -- understood the revolutionary character of the times and confronted newly the full range of social realities that continue to beset us now: the alienated workplace, the degraded environment, mass culture, changing sex roles, race, colonialism, and the endangered child. This course will explore the achievement of such writers in all its variety of form, content, and self-expression, from poetry to fiction to journalism to autobiography, to see it not only as a literature but, in its own terms, as a "culture."