Victorian Literature and Culture
British literature and culture during Queen Victoria's reign, 1837 to 1901, taught through MIT OpenCourseWare. Readings draw on Dickens, the Brontes, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Tennyson, set against the era's urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwinian science, religious crisis, and imperial expansion. The course materials include a syllabus, weekly reading assignments, and lecture notes tracing how novelists and poets responded to rapid industrial and social change. Assignments focus on close reading of major novels and poems alongside historical context on bureaucratization and Britain's expanding information networks. As with other MIT OCW offerings, all materials are free to access, there is no instructor interaction or certificate, and the course is meant for self-directed study of Victorian-era literary and cultural history.