This course meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:45 to 11:35. Monday and Wednesday classes are held in LL 2. Readings are listed below on the syllabus. In addition to completing the weekly reading, submitting the writing assignments and exams, and attending class regularly and participating in in-class discussion, you are required to participate in asynchronous Blackboard discussions every week.

This course is a broad survey of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. The purpose of the course is to introduce you to the range of writing during this period, to help you develop your critical interpretive skills, to assist you in improving your writing skills, and to help you develop your research skills. You need not have studied nineteenth and twentieth century British literature previously to take this course.

Assignments include a critical paper (3-5 pages in length), a midterm and final exam, 1 final critical research paper (10-12 pages in length), and regular participation in both Blackboard discussions and in-class discussions. You also have the option to revise and resubmit your first critical paper for an additional grade. If you choose to revise, the revision is due no later than the final day of class (May 4).

The first paper should be 3-5 pages in length. Topics can be found on Blackboard by following the "Writing Assignments" link. These papers are to be submitted to the digital drop box in Blackboard no later than 11:59.59 pm on the due date. Grade will be reduced one grade for every day the paper is late. Use MLA Format for citations.

The Guidelines for paper grading can be found here: http://www.public.asu.edu/~dbivona/papers.html.

A note on getting started: Effective note-taking, especially on the novels, is very important, because you will need to use your notes to find the evidence to support the claims you make in your papers. An effective literary thesis should assert something about the meaning of the work that is not obvious to everyone who has read it. Moreover, an effective literary thesis takes a stand on an issue of significant controversy over the meaning of the work. The paper topics, which can be found on Blackboard in the "Writing Assignments" area, will provide you with question prompts. These are based on significant critical issues that the novels have engendered.

The final paper, a critical research paper, should be 10-12 pages in length. You should use at least three secondary sources. Again, topics will be found on the course Blackboard in the "Assignments" area.

Weekly contributions to online class discussion: Everyone is required to pose at least 6 questions to his or her discussion group online over the course of the 16-week term. In addition, every student is required to respond at least once per week to other students' or our questions. You will be graded both on the frequency of your contributions and on the quality of them. The best strategy is to post at least 1 or 2 thoughtful responses and/or questions per week. Please be sure to make them thoughtful, paragraph-long responses, not quick, two-word, Twitter-like responses, and be sure to observe the conventions of civil online discourse (no flaming or personal remarks about other students in the class). Questions may deal with the previous week's reading or with the upcoming week's reading. You may ask questions or make responses that relate current material to material introduced earlier in the course, but please do not pose questions about a novel that the rest of the class will not have read for two more weeks. Questions should be posted no later than 9 AM Tuesday of each week and responses by 5 PM Thursday of each week to be counted for that week.

Topics raised in the the online discussions will be discussed in class as well.

Please note that all work done for this course must be your original work. If you make use of the insights of other writers, you must cite them in your papers using MLA citation format. Punishments for plagiarism can be very severe and may include a permanent grade of "failure with academic dishonesty" or suspension from the University. If you have any questions about what constitutes plagiarism, please ask me.

These books are currently available at the ASU Bookstore.

• Start searches with the new ASU Library One Search (beta).
• Literature Online (database containing primary texts in British and American literature)
• Literature Resource Center (provides access to a variety of primary and secondary texts, principally in British and American literature)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (biographies of British literary and historical figures)
• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (self-explanatory)
• JSTOR (large database of secondary sources in a variety of disciplines, some reaching back to the nineteenth century)
• Project Muse (large database of recent [1999-2008] secondary sources in a variety of disciplines)
• Periodicals Archive Online (large database of secondary sources, many from the nineteenth century)
• Nineteenth Century Masterfile (digital index: identifies locations of primary and secondary material; it is not a database of primary source material)
• Academic Search Premier (large database of principally secondary source material)
• MLA Bibliography (bibliographic index of secondary sources in modern language and literature)

N. B. All the above sources can be searched online through the ASU Library website. You must go through this site in order to be validated to use these sources.

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The sites below can be searched directly through the internet:

• Google Scholar (a better source for scholarly articles and books than google.com; multi-disciplinary)
• Google Books (extensive database of online texts; it also links to recent copyright-protected material)
• Victorian Web (extensive, although incomplete, website offering lots of useful information on the Victorian period)
• LITIR Victorian Studies Database (a searchable bibliographic index)
• MLA Paper Format
• Guidelines for Evaluating Online Sources (Rio Salado College)
• Hyperhistory Online