Course Description
Summary
Time collapses while industry and science expands. Looking to the future, the Victorians clung to sentimentality as a response to a world that seemed to have industrialized overnight. From Arnold to Wilde, we’ll explore the prevailing poets of the Victorian era alongside investigations into Victorian visual culture, photography, and paper arts. In a time when letters were burned and books a luxury, we’ll take a tour of the Victorian relationship to paper and literacy. We’ll learn about disappearing buildings, the fragility of images on wet-glass, the art of illustration, and personal book-making. We’ll dwell within the ideas of ephemerality, trickery, and mimicry. Students will be required to write critically on poems and also produce ephemera inspired by the Victorians.
