Literature

A madwoman in the attic, impassioned love, and a mysterious/abusive past.  Such sensational themes may seem ripped from today’s social media, but, in fact, they are the defining elements of the novels of the Brontë sisters. We will adopt new historicist and gender studies approaches to study arguably the greatest English literary family of the nineteenth century.

A madwoman in the attic, impassioned love, and a mysterious/abusive past.  Such sensational themes may seem ripped from today’s social media, but, in fact, they are the defining elements of the novels of the Brontë sisters. We will adopt new historicist and gender studies approaches to study arguably the greatest English literary family of the nineteenth century.

William Delisle Hay's The Doom of the Great City (1880) is relatively unknown today, even among scholars who specialize in Victorian literature. There is little scholarship on the novella, and it’s not commonly taught in high school or college classrooms. Our hope is that this critical edition will change that. Doom's engagement with nineteenth-century science, environmental concerns, and the post-apocalyptic genre lend it much relevancy in the twenty-first century.