Using current theoretical debates as a framework, this course will study the vigorous interaction of literary and visual culture in Victorian Britain. We will consider the functioning of museums and art galleries as newly accessible public spaces; the role of the sister arts (poetry and painting) in negotiating alternating trends of iconophobia and iconophilia; and the effects of photographic inventions on the visual imagination. Both epistemological problems (such as the camera’s decentering of the human eye as the locus of visual mastery) and trends in material culture (developments in printing technology that increased public access to illustrated literature) will be grist to our mill. Our critical reading will include texts by Nancy Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Crary, and W. J. T. Mitchell, while Victorian literary texts will include the works of the Brownings, "Michael Field," Walter Pater, John Ruskin, the Rossettis, A. C. Swinburne, W. M. Thackeray, Oscar Wilde and others.