Postgraduate Course: Romanticism and Victorian Society 1815-1900 (ENLI11141)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Available to all students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | English Literature |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | This course picks up the strands of the semester 1 course on 'Enlightenment and Romanticism' - political economy, the nation, gender and class hierarchies - and takes them forward into the nineteenth century. It traces their ramifications across a wide range of genres, and introduces students to the complexities of the interaction between literary and cultural formations in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The course is divided thematically rather than chronologically into five major sections, focusing on religion, science, nation and Empire, gender, and class. In each of these sections, established literary genres such as the novel, the romance, the lyric and the elegy (as well as a range of modes from the Gothic to the naturalistic) are brought into dialogue with other forms, including short stories, reviews, treatises, essays and lectures. The aim is to assess both the modifications that 'literary' and 'non-literary' texts undergo in response to each other, and the ways they reflect and in their turn influence social reality. |
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| Displayed in Visiting Students Prospectus? | No |
Course Delivery Information
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| Delivery period: 2014/15 Semester 2, Available to all students (SV1)
|
Learn enabled: Yes |
Quota: None |
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Web Timetable |
Web Timetable |
| Course Start Date |
12/01/2015 |
| Breakdown of Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Additional Notes |
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| Breakdown of Assessment Methods (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| No Exam Information |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
* an understanding of how literary writing documents and mediates national, imperial, gender, class and religious identities from the end of the French wars in 1815 to the turn of the century.
* an understanding of the social agency of literary writing in the period. |
Assessment Information
| 4000 Word Essay (100%) |
Special Arrangements
| No UG version. |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Aims and Objectives
* to attempt to understand textual production in relation to social formations and their conceptualisation.
* to consider how ideas developed in political or historical discourses might borrow from and contribute to literary writing.
* to evaluate the ways in which literary writing changed in response to social, political, and scientific developments over the course of the nineteenth century. |
| Syllabus |
Striving with God: Varieties of Religious Experience
Week 1. Lyrical Drama: P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1818)
Week 2. Elegy: Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
Men Like Gods: Supernatural Nature and the Science of Humanity
Week 3. Gothic Romance: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818/1831)
Week 4. Scientific Romance: H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
Far Away and Long Ago: Adventures of Nation and Empire
Week 5. Historical Romance: Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819)
Week 6. Imperial Romance: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (1885)
Provincial Tragedies: Men and Women
Week 7. Realist Novel: George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
Week 8. Naturalist Novel: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)
London Lowlife: Poverty and Crime
Week 9. Social Melodrama: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
Week 10. Slum Fiction: Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896) |
| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Additional Background Reading
Week 2. Selections from the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, G. M. Hopkins
Week 3. Walter Scott's review of Frankenstein; Humphry Davy, A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry; Lord Byron, Manfred
Week 4. Charles Darwin, extracts from The Descent of Man; T. H. Huxley, 'Evolution and Ethics'
Week 5. Walter Scott, 'An Essay on Romance'; Andrew Lang, 'Realism and Romance'; William Morris, 'A King's Lesson'
Week 6. H. Rider Haggard, 'On Romance'; Joseph Conrad's 'An Outpost of Progress' and other selections from Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870-1918
Week 7. George Eliot, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'; John Ruskin, 'Of Queens' Gardens'
Week 8. Thomas Hardy, 'Candour in English Fiction'; J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women
Week 9. Elizabeth B. Browning, 'The Cry of the Children', 'A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London'; Friedrich Engels, extracts from The Condition of the Working Class in England
Week 10. Henry Mayhew, extracts from London Labour and the London Poor; Selections from Into Unknown England 1866-1913: Selections from the Social Explorers
Secondary Reading
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
---, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971)
Marshall Brown, ed. The Romantic Age, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5 (2008)
James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981)
Martha B. Helfer, Rereading Romanticism (2000)
Duncan Wu, ed. A Companion to Romanticism (1997)
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: the Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890 (1993)
Herbert Tucker, A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1998)
Elisabeth Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (1986)
J. A. V. Chapple, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1986)
Tess Cosslett, ed., Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (1984)
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993)
Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999)
Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1988)
Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006)
Richard Cronin, et. al., eds. The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002)
Joseph Bristow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000)
Gillian Beer, The Romance (1970)
Derek Brewer, 'The Nature of Romance,' Poetica 9 (1978)
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976)
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (2004)
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (1971)
Gyorgy Lukács, The Historical Novel (1962)
Harold Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes Toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920 (1995)
Harry E. Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (1983)
Francis O'Gorman, ed., The Victorian Novel (2002)
Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830-1890 (1994)
Gail Marshall, Victorian Fiction (2002)
Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002)
Deirdre David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002)
Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-century Literary Realism through the Looking-glass (1996)
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (1981)
Dennis Walder, ed., The Realist Novel (1996)
Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(1987)
Linda M. Shires, Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (1992)
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994)
Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble, Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art (1993)
E. K. Helsinger, R. L. Sheets, W. Veeder, eds., The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (1983)
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (1982)
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995)
Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972)
---, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977)
Regina Barreca, ed. Sex and Death in Victorian Literature (1990)
Linda M. Shires, Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (1992)
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994)
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sie¿cle (1997)
Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed. A New Woman Reader (2000)
Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-class Literature (1974)
Pamela Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1940 (1994)
Ian Haywood, Working-class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting (1997)
H. Gustav Klaus, ed. The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (1985)
--- and Stephen Knight, eds. British Industrial Fictions (2000)
Peter Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971)
S. Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (2008)
Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2006)
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995)
Dorothy Hammond, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (1970)
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988)
Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man¿s World (1991)
Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980)
Jeffrey Richards, ed. Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (1989)
Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2006)
Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance (2000)
Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature, 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire (1998)
C. C. Eldridge, The Imperial Experience: From Carlyle to Forster (1996)
Julia Rawa, The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory from Conrad to Greene (2005)
Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995)
Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (2000)
Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914 (1999)
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (1989)
William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940 (1994)
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1996)
Gail Marshall, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (2007)
Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 (1989)
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| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | RaVS |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Anna Vaninskaya
Tel: (0131 6)50 4284
Email: avaninsk@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr Gordon Littlejohn
Tel: (0131 6)51 3988
Email: Gordon.Littlejohn@ed.ac.uk |
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