Department of EnglishLater British Literature

Recent Graduate Courses in Later British Literature

ENGL 5315: Studies in British Fiction: Children's Literature

Dr. Dana Aicha Shaaban, Fall 2025

This course examines the development of British children's literature from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, a period that witnessed the emergence of children's literature as a distinct and influential genre. We will investigate how texts such as Oliver Twist, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and others shaped notions of childhood, morality, and national identity at the time. Through engagement with critical perspectives—including children's literature scholarship, postcolonial theory, and gender studies—students will analyze how these works address anxieties surrounding race, nationhood, and evolving conceptions of innocence and experience in a rapidly modernizing Britain.

ENGL 5341: Histories and Theories of the Book

Dr. Marta Kvande, Fall 2025

This course offers an overview of material text production across history and cultures, beginning with scribal and print cultures and the hand-press period, through the nineteenth-century industrialization of print, and end with digital texts. We will study the relationships between texts and their material embodiments, from stone to screen, papyrus to paper, codex to Kindle, attending to books (or scrolls, or a stylus, or a ball-point pen, or a printing press, etc.) as technologies that shape meaning and readers' responses. We'll also study the historical development of ideas about authors and authorship, readers and reading, publishers and publishing, and legal developments. As part of the course, we will pay particular attention to post-1700 British reading and publishing practices in relation to specific texts like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Graham Rawle's Woman's World. Students will have the opportunity to work with Special Collections materials, to work in the English department Letterpress Studio, and engage with a variety of technologies of textual production.

ENGL 5309: Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Romanticism and Criminal Justice

Dr. Marjean Purinton, Fall 2023

This course surveys the British Romantic Period (1780–1830) with a focus on consequential changes effected in criminal justice during this revolutionary and tumultuous time. Because of the period's significant paradigm shift in criminal justice, it is not surprising for us to see spectacular violence and crime, public punishments, legal proceedings, and courtroom scenes represented in popular culture and literature. We will read Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb William, Mary Shelley's Falkner, P. B. Shelley's The Cenci, Inchbald's Such Things Are, Byron's Manfred, and Robinson's Nobody as well as diverse poetry and nonfiction selections. From the literature, we will explore the forces shaping and reflecting the period's reforms in criminal justice, including crime detection and prevention, female criminality, and debates over punishment and rehabilitation. We will discover how this important paradigm shift shapes the cultural foundations upon which our own systems of justice rest and how it informs our contemporary challenges with prison and policing reforms, social justice inequities, the #MeToo Movement, civil unrest portrayed in movies such as She Said (2022) about the Harvey Weinstein scandal and Women Talking (2023) about sexual assaults on women.