The Nineteenth-Century Reading Group regularly invites current and past faculty and graduate students to read and discuss nineteenth-century texts (usually around semi-themed snacks). We decide together what to read, breaking longer works into parts over a semester or year. Members can suggest texts from any genre, but we usually tackle the things our readers want to discuss as a group. In the past, these have included novels that students needed to read in preparation for comprehensive exams, texts relevant to current research projects, potential syllabus additions, and works appropriate to the season. Our selections are not always obviously British (such as our transatlantic partnership with the Americanist Reading Group for Turn of the Screw) or technically nineteenth-century (as with The Mysteries of Udolpho). See below for a list of completed texts, and check out more of our pictures on the scrapbook page.
Current organizer: Mark Celeste
Current Texts (AY 2017-2018):
– “The Wer-Wolf” (1838)
– “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” (1839)
– Excerpts from “Wagner the Wehr-Wolf” (1846)
– “The Gray Wolf” (1871)
– “Dracula’s Guest” (1892)
-Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849)
Past Texts:
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (jointly with the Americanist Reading Group)
- George Gissing, New Grub Street
- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, selections from Poems before Congress
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn
- Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
- Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies
- Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol