Through reading of nineteenth-century novels, poetry, prose, theoretical texts, and visual images, this course explores the complex and shifting understandings of gender and sexuality in the period.  Among the topics considered will be 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 homosexual 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.  The course will also ask how gender and sexuality have been deployed by twentieth/twenty-first 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.