Postgraduate Course: The Victorians and the Past (ENLI11136)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The Victorians rewrote and appropriated the past in order to further their own ideological agendas, and made it a warning or an exemplar for their contemporaries. In this course we will survey several broad areas that loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination via the poetry and fiction of major authors, and through contextual readings from contemporary publications. We will examine literature as part of a complex interdisciplinary network of knowledge creation, and explore how a wide range of writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past, of ancestry, heritage, and modernity. |
| Course description |
Few things can tell us more about a society than its view of history, its sense of the past. Much of what we think of as modern had its origins in the Victorian period, but the Victorians themselves were obsessed with what came before. And for good reason. New disciplines like geology, biology, archaeology, philology, anthropology, and comparative folklore had unearthed a bewildering variety of hitherto unsuspected pasts. New schools, museums, and publishing practices diffused the knowledge to a wider public than ever before. Political, religious, scientific, and literary debates were conducted in terms of competing understandings of history. The Victorians rewrote and appropriated the past in order to further their own ideological agendas, and made it a warning or an exemplar for their contemporaries. In this course we will survey several broad areas that loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination via the poetry and fiction of major authors, and through contextual readings from contemporary publications. We will examine literature as part of a complex interdisciplinary network of knowledge creation, and explore how a wide range of writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past, of ancestry, heritage, and modernity.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | Essential course texts |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate competence in core skills in the advanced study of English Literature: independent research, essay planning and writing, group discussion, oral presentation, and small-group autonomous learning.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to critically analyse a wide variety of Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian forms of writing.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate understanding of how different nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to show knowledge of the range of disciplinary contexts out of which the selected texts emerged and with which they engaged.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to put into dialogue 'literary' and 'non-literary' sources and trace continuities across periods and genres.
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Reading List
Extracts from a selection of primary readings will be made available via Learn.
Secondary Texts
Blakesley, Rosalind, The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006)
Bowler, Peter, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (1989)
Brooks, Chris, The Gothic Revival (1999)
Bryden, Inga, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (2005)
Burrow, J. W., Evolution and Society (1966)
---, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981)
Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (1971)
Chancellor, Valerie, History for Their Masters: Opinion in the English History Textbook, 1800-1914 (1970)
Dellheim, Charles, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian Britain (1982/2004)
Dorson, Richard Mercer, The British Folklorists: A History (1968)
Freeman, Michael, Victorians and the Prehistoric (2004)
Gilmour, Robin, The Victorian Period (1993)
Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)
Goldhill, Simon, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011)
Jann, Rosemary, The Art and Science of Victorian History (1985)
Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980)
Lambourne, Lionel, Victorian Painting (1999)
Orel, Harold, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes Toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920 (1995)
Kuper, Adam, The Invention of Primitive Society (1988)
Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838-1886 (1986)
Mitchell, Rosemary, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (2000)
Sanders, Andrew, The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-1880 (1978)
Shaw, Harry E., The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (1983)
Simmons, Clare, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth- Century British Literature (1990)
Stocking, George, Victorian Anthropology (1987)
Strong, Roy, And When Did You Last See Your Father?: The Victorian Painter and British History (1978/2004)
Vance, Norman, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (1997)
Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2000)
Wood, Christopher, Victorian Painting (1999)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
PG Version |
| Keywords | TVatP |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Anna Vaninskaya
Tel: (0131 6)50 4284
Email: avaninsk@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Sophie Bryan
Tel: (0131 6)51 1764
Email: Sophie.Bryan@ed.ac.uk |
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