ENG 4365 Victorian Literature: Seminar II ‐‐‐ The Pre‐Raphaelite Movement Section A (Fall) Professor Mary Arseneau Description The Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood’s original impulse was to reform British painting by reintroducing the sincerity, high purpose, and attention to nature that they felt had been lost since the time of Raphael. This seminar will chart the evolution of the Pre‐Raphaelite movement in art and poetry, beginning with the moral aesthetic embraced by the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848‐1853) and tracing Pre‐Raphaelitism through its diverse later expressions. Our study will focus on the poetry and prose of three central Pre‐Raphaelite figures—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris—and will also take into account Pre‐Raphaelite painting as well as the various nineteenth‐century statements on Pre‐Raphaelite aesthetics. A wide variety of critical es will be embraced. Themes and issues to be considered include Pre‐Raphaelite medievalism, the Pre‐Raphaelite interest in the “fallen woman” as subject and object, the place of the woman poet in the brotherhood, Tractarian poetics, the Rossetti’s and Dante, the Rossettis’ role in the Victorian revival of the sonnet sequence, and all three poets’ place in the evolution of that quintessentially Victorian poetic form—the dramatic monologue. In the final stage of the course we will consider the later trajectories of our three main figures: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s turn toward the Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s and 1890s; William Morris’s involvement in socialism and the Arts and Crafts Movement; and Christina Rossetti’s late‐life devotional writing. Although the original impulse of Pre‐Raphaelitism was diffused, to the end the movement retained an opposition to convention and to mainstream bourgeois Victorian culture. Method Seminar Grading Seminar presentations and participation, 50%, Term paper, 50% Texts Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Text by R.W. Crump, notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin, 2001. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McCann. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Course Package Texts available at Benjamin Books, 122 Osgoode St.
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