WGST304

Explores the complex and shifting understandings of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century through reading of the period’s novels, poetry, prose, theoretical texts, and visual images. May include topics such as the construction of heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage; marriage resistance and the 'new women'; constructions of dominant and deviant masculinities and femininities; homosocial and homosexual love and panics; prostitution and the disciplining of female sexuality, suffrage and the campaigns for women's autonomy; as well as the codes, narratives, and images through which these are represented. Inquires how gender and sexuality have been deployed by 20th/ 21st century critics as lenses for reading the literature and culture of this period and how those approaches have shifted over time in dialogue with other critical approaches.

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