ENGL 21004 - Empire Boys (pre 1900)

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
This course interrogates the gender models constructed and contested within 19th century literature and popular culture, with a specific but not exclusive focus on masculinity. British culture accommodated very different-and often conflicting-models of “manliness” as a result of industrialization and the rapid rise of the British Empire; these included “muscular Christianity,” the Sahib, the dandy, and the flaneur or aesthete. Seeking to understand the ways that imperial models of masculinity continue to inflect gender roles for both men and women today, we will explore a range of genres, including adventure and sensation novels; poetry and drama; popular culture; and literary and gender theory. We will read authors like Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, Thomas Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Bradden, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad, as well as theorist and critics like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Richard Dellamora, James Eli Adams, and John Tosh. [Before 1900] [AH]