2026-27 Courses
This page gives some basic information about my Fall 2026 and Winter 2027 courses. This page will be updated as plans and book lists get finalized. 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 2026
English 3032, The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy
Drawing on the now-established traditions of the novel, authors during this period found ways to revise or challenge its conventions by experimenting with fictional forms, techniques, and subjects. The pressing issues of social and personal reform that motivated earlier Victorian fiction continued to inspire great, moving and innovative writing by novelists such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, both of whom will be represented on the reading list. We will read Elizabeth Gaskell’s great ‘condition of England’ novel North and South, and we will treat ourselves to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, often considered the greatest 19th-century English novel and described somewhat enigmatically by Virginia Woolf as “the only English novel written for grownup people.”
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 3032 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).
Tentative Book List
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin Classics)
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Penguin Classics)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Penguin Classics
WINTER 2027
English 1026, Literature: Why It Matters
More information including a book list will be available by September; a detailed syllabus and schedule will be available for registered students on Brightspace by the end of December.
Please note that English 1026 does not count towards the Writing Requirement. It does count as half of the 6 credit hours of 1000-level ENGL required for upper-level English classes.
English 4205, Women and Detective Fiction
Until September, permissions for all 4000-level seminars are handled by the English Department office.
At least since Irene Adler beat Sherlock Holmes at his own game, women have had an extensive and complicated relationship with both detectives and detective fiction. Even before Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple first appeared in 1930, they did their share of crime-solving, and Christie is just one of the many women writers prominent in the field in the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Women including Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes wrote noir fiction in the mid-century, often pushing back against the tropes and conventions of their hard-boiled male contemporaries; and P. D. James, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky are only a few of the many women whose crime fiction topped late 20th-century best-seller lists. Many contemporary writers use the form to explore links between individual crises and systemic injustices. In this course we will read a sampling of fiction by women that explores the relationship between gender and crime, sometimes by centering women as investigators, sometimes by interrogating women’s conventional roles in the mystery genre, from victim to femme fatale. We will explore the different approaches in our readings to questions about crime, law, justice, morality, knowledge, and power, and about the role class, religion, race, and disability play in how these issues are configured and what resolution is imagined as possible or desirable.
A detailed syllabus and schedule will be available for registered students on Brightspace by December.
Tentative Book List
Agatha Christie, Miss Marple: the complete short stories
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Dorothy B. Hughes, In A Lonely Place
P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam
Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only
Claudia Pineiro, Elena Knows
Katherena Vermette, The Break
Updated April 16, 2026
Novel Readings 