In this seminar we will read works by four key nineteenth-century novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. Each Victorian text will be paired with modern and postmodern literary and media adaptations, as well as articles on neo-Victorian and adaptation theory, to explore the persistent fascination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers with the textual politics and conventions of the Victorian age.  Our discussions will center on how and why (post)modern authors revise, subvert, and deconstruct Victorian fiction, and re-imagine nineteenth-century socio-political preoccupations with race, class, gender, childhood, imperialism, and science.  We will consider how modern and postmodern literary adaptations of Victorian "classics" question and problematize the relationship between literature and history. Finally, the course will consider to what extent literary and historical adaptation/revision reveals as much about each writer's present as the re-imagined past.