Excellent all-round language skills in English

Demonstrate the ability to explore the complexities of literary signification;
appreciate literature as an expression of historical and cultural preoccupations;
understand and use different critical approaches to Victorian culture;
communicate reflections, analyses, and arguments effectively in speaking and
writing.

The Race for Wealth

The course is designed to stimulate discussion on the fraught relation between
Victorian fiction and capitalist modernization. We will analyse three novels that
openly address pressing questions related to the 'race for wealth' in the nineteenth
century, including social inequality, financial crises, commercial frauds (food
adulteration), imprisonment for debt and the ever recurring specter of economic
uncertainty. The course will focus on how novelists, male and female, rework these
issues in their fiction, what narrative and rhetorical strategies they adopt to come to
terms with the contradictions of commercial and financial modernity, and how social
satire is deployed to criticize, from a moral standpoint, the excesses of capitalist
accummulation. By comparing canonical and non-canonical novels, students will be
able to appreciate a variety of styles and modes of writing and to reflect upon the
mechanisms of canon formation, the entrenched English tradition of literary anti-
capitalism, the promises and disappointments of financial modernity.
We will make use of digital humanities resources - The ProQuest on-line archive of British Periodicals - to gain a better understanding of historical contexts.

• 1.  (A) Charles Dickens Little Dorrit qualsiasi (in inglese), UK, 2000
• 2.  (A) Anthony Trollope The Way We Live Now qualsiasi (in inglese), UK, 2000
• 3.  (A) Charlotte Riddell The Race for Wealth qualsiasi (in inglese), UK, 2000 » Pagine/Capitoli: il testo è reperibile sul sito Internet Archives in fromato PDF

Further bibliographical material will be distributed in class.

• Lectures and class discussions
  Seminars with invited guests
  Students workshops
  

• 2000-word essay in English (50%)
  
  Power-Point presentation in class (50%)
  
  
  
  

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