Nineteenth-Century Studies
(Image: Henriques Bonfils Bookstore, Denmark 1899
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.)
The Nineteenth-Century Studies program at Loyola allows students to explore British and American literature. Our faculty work in diverse fields including Antebellum Literature and Culture, the Victorian Novel, English Poetry, Digital Textuality, and Poetics.
Requirements:- English 400: Introduction to Graduate Study
- English 402: Teaching College Composition
- Five courses in nineteenth-century literature
- Two courses in critical theory
- One course in Medieval or Renaissance literature
- One course in modern literature and culture
- English 502: Independent Study for Doctoral Qualification
- Electives to fulfill the 60-hour requirement
Faculty:
Bost, Clarke, Cragwall, Fennell, Glover, Jones, Kaminski, Kerkering, Shillingsburg
Sample Courses:
A list is available here.
Featured Faculty Books:
Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identies in the Americas, 1850-2000.
by Suzanne Bost
This book offers a transnational analysis of three forms of mixed identity in the Americas: mulattas, mestizas, and creoles. Important contemporary literature by Latina, Caribbean, and African American writers -- from Cherríe Moraga and Cristina García to Michelle Cliff and Ntozake Shange -- recalls a largely unknown tradition of writing by women dating from the nineteenth century. This genealogy of attitudes toward racial and sexual mixture establishes an alternative lineage for experimental modes of identity usually associated with postmodernism.
Thackeray and Women
by Micael M. Clarke
In this first study to address women in Thackeray's fiction, Clarke draws on the writer's biography as well as his novels, tales, and nonfictional writings to place him in the context of the women's movement. Approaching her analysis from a feminist-sociological perspective, Clarke connects Thackeray's novels to historical developments in nineteenth-century feminism and identifies an evolution in Thackeray's fictional treatment of women. Contrary to traditional representations of the writer as conventional and even hostile to "the Cause," the portrait of Thackeray that emerges is of a man both of his age and far ahead of it.
The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)
by John D. Kerkering
Examining the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America, John Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Hawthorne and Whitman used poetic effect to emphasize the distinctiveness of certain groups against a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering tells the story of how poetry helped define America as a nation before helping to define America into distinct racial categories. He concludes that through a shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities become related elements of a single literary history.
Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism
by Steven Jones
Steven Jones here explains the history of the Luddites, British textile works who, from around 1811, proclaimed themselves followers of "Ned Ludd" and smashed machinery they saw as threatening trade. Against Technology is a book about representations, about the image and the myth of the Luddites and how that myth was transformed over time into modern neo-Luddism.