2025-26 Courses
This page gives some basic information about my Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 courses. The book lists for all of my 2025-2026 classes are now finalized (see below). Brightspace sites will be available to registered students prior to the start of each term. If you have questions about any of my upcoming courses that aren’t answered here, don’t hesitate to email me. Contact information for all members of the department can be found here.
FALL 2025
Plans for the Fall 2025 term are being impacted by the ongoing lockout of Dalhousie Faculty Association members. At the moment it is difficult to predict when the contract dispute will be resolved, but it is clear that the start of classes – including mine – will be delayed. Registered students should assume that the course schedule and requirements as posted to Brightspace in early August will need to be revised. In the meantime, the best strategy is to do some of the reading for the course. The study questions available on Brightspace will help to orient you in the kinds of analysis we will do together when we are able to meet. If you have questions about the reasons for the lockout and the responding defensive strike by the DFA, feel free to talk with folks on the picket lines; you can also get more information here. It is worth noting that the communications from the administration have been at best disingenuous and at worst dishonest and misleading on key issues.
English 3031, The 19th-Century British Novel from Austen to Dickens
In this course we will study a selection of British fiction from the first half of the nineteenth century. During these decades, authors experimented with both the form and the subject matter of fiction as they transformed the novel from a generic upstart into the century’s dominant literary form. Broad issues our discussions are likely to engage include the relationship of the present to the past, of the individual to society, and of the individual to modern institutions and systems (such as government, law, religion, or industry); problems of self-discovery and identity; questions of love, marriage, and morality; questions of gender, class, and race; and the role of the artist, especially the novelist, and of literature, especially the novel, in investigating, articulating, and affecting all of these issues.
Some of our readings will be long; you should be prepared to put in the time to read them attentively. Your effort will be heartily repaid in both pleasure and insight. Regular, well-informed, and enthusiastic class participation will be encouraged; regular, well-informed, and meticulous writing will be required.
A detailed syllabus and schedule for English 3031 will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of August. If you have any questions about the course in the meantime, please feel free to email me (Dr.Maitzen@Dal.Ca).
Book List (Confirmed as of April 29, 2025)
Jane Austen, Persuasion (Broadview Press)
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Penguin Classics)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Broadview Press)
These editions have been ordered for English 3031 by the King’s Coop Bookstore (note that they will not be available at the Dalhousie Bookstore). In most of these cases it is fine to use a different edition, although I strongly recommend using one that is well edited and has good notes (such as Oxford World’s Classics, Norton Critical, Broadview, or Penguin). If cost is an issue, check local used bookstores and libraries. The Dal Libraries also have all of the OWC editions available as e-books. You should get the Broadview edition of Cranford, however, as it includes additional readings that will be assigned for the course. Other editions of Cranford will not include all of the assigned material.
WINTER 2026
English 2002, British Literature Since 1800
English 2002 samples some of the remarkable diversity of British literature written between 1800 and the present, tracing both changes and continuities across the years conventionally (but, as we will discuss, somewhat arbitrarily) referred to as the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. We will pay attention to the often dramatic formal innovations of the writers we read as well as their widely varying ways of engaging with, celebrating, or critiquing the ever-changing social and historical contexts of the modernizing world.
The book list for English 2002 is confirmed as of July 15; a detailed syllabus and schedule will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of December.
Book List (confirmed) – the texts for this class will be available at the Dalhousie Bookstore
Broadview Anthology of British Literature – Custom Course Reader
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford World’s Classics)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Broadview Press)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Vintage)
English 4040 / English 5450, George Eliot
Until September, permissions for all 4000-level seminars are handled by the English Department office.
In her own time, George Eliot was scorned as a “strong-minded woman” for her scandalous personal life and courted both admiration and controversy as the “first great godless writer of fiction.” Her first full-length novel Adam Bede was a massive bestseller, beloved of readers including Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria; the best known and most admired of her novels today is Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf provocatively and enigmatically called “the first English novel written for grown-up people.” In this seminar we will explore the extraordinary range of George Eliot’s fiction.
The reading list for Winter 2026 is now finalized. It will includes “Janet’s Repentance,” a harrowing account of alcoholism and domestic abuse from Eliot’s earliest fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1856); her most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860); her beautiful secular fable Silas Marner (1861); Felix Holt: the Radical (1866), with its timely questions about the promise and limits of democracy; and her complex final masterpiece, Daniel Deronda (1876), which offers both Eliot’s most explicit and scathing critique of women’s position in Victorian society and her most far-reaching and, today, politically problematic vision for restoring the moral and spiritual character of the nation.
A detailed syllabus and schedule (including information about requirements for the graduate version of the seminar) will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of December. If you have any questions about the course in the meantime, please feel free to email me (Dr.Maitzen@Dal.Ca).
English 4040 / 5450 Confirmed Book List
Note that all books will be ordered through the King’s Coop bookstore. Given the length of the novels, it helps a lot if we all have the same editions, so that we can be literally on the same page during discussion. If you opt for different editions, please choose other scholarly ones so that you have a reliable text and adequate notes and other apparatus.
George Eliot, “Janet’s Repentance” (from Scenes of Clerical Life) – PDF will be provided
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
George Eliot, Felix Holt: the Radical (1866)
George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
Updated July 11, 2025
Novel Readings 