In Tennyson's poetry of sensation, the shocking fictions of Collins and Braddon, and the sensually charged poetry of D.G. Rossetti and Swinburne, literary sensations became a nexus for Victorian anxieties about the embodied effects of literary form. This course investigates how authors deployed sensation in poetry and prose as they drew on emergent scientific discourses on disease and madness, ruptured barriers between high and low cultural forms, and blurred categories of class and gender to question the role of aesthetic labor in Victorian culture.

This course will examine literary texts that represent new forms of visuality in nineteenth-century Britain as well as examples of visual culture that provide a framework for reading Victorian culture in innovative ways. We will study nineteenth-century photography--portraiture, prison photography, imperial photographs, and private and popular erotic images--as well as novels and autobiographical writing that engage with new photographic technology and its transformation of the ways in which Victorians understood identity, politics, aesthetics, and representation.

William Wordsworth lived through a time of revolutions and world wars: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, wars of independence and of imperial conquest, and, behind it all the social transformations arising from the industrial revolution. As Wordsworth wrestled with how to adapt his art to these new realities, he introduced dramatically new content and experimented with a startling variety of poetic forms, styles, and techniques. In the end his main subject became the question of how individual identity is formed.

This course will examine the writing of Emily Dickinson, both her poetry and her letters. We will consider the cultural, historical, political, religious, and familial environment in which she lived. Special attention will be paid to Dickinson's place as a woman artist in the nineteenth century. The class will meet at the Dickinson Museum (280 Main Street in Amherst and accessible by Five College bus). Enrollment is limited to ten students.

Seminar on Joyce's major texts excluding Finnegan's Wake. Beginning with Dubliners, the seminar will consider recent trends in critical theory as they pertain to Joyce's work. Half the semester will be spent on a careful reading of Ulysses. Students will be responsible for seminar reports as well as a midterm paper (7-10 pages) and a final paper (15-20 pages).

If all is fair in love and war, are there rules for the game of power and seduction? As we move through the golden ages of absolute power in Spain, France, and Italy, will we witness a change for women? Students will explore such questions as they read plays by Tirso de Molina, Jos' Zorilla, Moli're, Beaumarchais, Goldoni; Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, and film versions of Dangerous Liaisons and Casanova's Memoirs.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion, assessing the nature of religion and methodological approaches through an examination of subject matter drawn from numerous traditions.

An examination of the documents, trial records, historical responses, and continuing scholarship on this woman who was admired by her friends, scorned by her church, and banished from the early Boston community. Two hundred years later she was used by Nathaniel Hawthorne as the model for Hester Prynne in THE SCARLET LETTER. Students will read primary materials and write a number of critical and evaluative papers.

This course examines Islamic religious beliefs and practices from the origins of Islam to the present, focusing on such central issues as scripture and tradition, law and theology, sectarianism and mysticism. Attention will be given to the variety of Islamic understandings of monotheism, prophethood, dogma, ritual, and society.