This is a critical introduction to major genres of Victorian literature. It offers an opportunity to explore how novelists, poets, and non-fiction prose writers such as the Brontës, Dickens, Tennyson, Darwin, Robert Browning, J.S. Mill, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde respond to crisis and transition: the Industrial Revolution, the Idea of Progress, and the Woman Question. Other topics may include the Romantic inheritance, liberty and equality, theology and natural selection, empire and nation, Art for Art’s Sake, the Fin de siècle, and Decadence. The multi-genre setup of the course allows students to see how novels, poems, and non-fiction prose develop as individual genres and converse with each other in responding to the same issues. Authors and topics vary with the instructor.