THE UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH

DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2017/2018

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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures : English Literature

Undergraduate Course: Modern Love: Victorian Poetry and Prose. (ENLI10370)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Literatures, Languages and Cultures CollegeCollege of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) AvailabilityNot available to visiting students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryModern ideas of 'Victorian values' depend upon clichés and distortions of Victorian ideas of love: reverence for the nuclear family combined with prudishness and prurience; marriage plots, covered table-legs and scandal sheets publishing the dirty secrets of the divorce courts. This course offers students the opportunity to discover the complex and diverse forms of Victorian interpersonal relationship, through close examination of a range of poetry, prose and drama.
Course description Modern ideas of 'Victorian values' depend upon clichés and distortions of Victorian ideas of love: reverence for the nuclear family combined with prudishness and prurience; marriage plots, covered table-legs and scandal sheets publishing the dirty secrets of the divorce courts. This course offers students the opportunity to discover the complex and diverse forms of Victorian interpersonal relationship, through close examination of a range of poetry, prose and drama. Prudes, perverts, and perfect families will be encountered, but so too will bigamists, emancipated women, loving and unloving patrons, unhappy families, passionate friendships, failed marriages, and families of choice. The construction and subversion of gender norms, and the impact of factors such as class, education, locale, and religion on the way love is understood as normative or perverse, will be major themes of the course.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Students MUST have passed: ( English Literature 1 (ENLI08001) OR Scottish Literature 1 (ENLI08016)) AND ( English Literature 2 (ENLI08003) OR Scottish Literature 2 (ENLI08004))
Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Course Delivery Information
Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1) Quota:  36
Course Start Semester 1
Timetable Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) Total Hours: 200 ( Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 174 )
Assessment (Further Info) Written Exam 60 %, Coursework 30 %, Practical Exam 10 %
Additional Information (Assessment) one Coursework Essay (2500 words) - 30%;
Class participation assessment - 10%;
one formal Examination (2 hours) - 60%
Feedback Not entered
Exam Information
Exam Diet Paper Name Hours & Minutes
Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May)2:00
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. demonstrate competence in core skills in the study of English Literature: essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning
  2. demonstrate an ability to critically analyse Victorian poetry, prose and drama
  3. show knowledge of the historical contexts of Victorian representations of interpersonal relationships
  4. demonstrate knowledge of recent critical debates regarding Victorian representations of interpersonal relationships
  5. demonstrate the ability to reflect critically on a variety of critical and methodological approaches to Victorian poetry, prose and drama
Reading List
Poetry, plays and some supplementary readings for the course will be provided via LEARN.
Students are expected to use the following critical editions. Other editions do not contain the same critical material or use different copy texts:
Jane Eyre (Norton)
Aurora Leigh (Norton)
The Mill on the Floss (Norton)
Great Expectations (Norton)
Modern Love (Yale University Press edition: access via LEARN or DiscoverEd)
New Grub Street (Oxford)

Week 1 Love Poetry I:
1. Robert Browning, ¿The Statue and the Bust¿. VIA LEARN
2. Matthew Arnold, ¿Isolation. To Marguerite¿ and ¿To Marguerite ¿ Continued¿. VIA LEARN
3. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ¿Rizpah¿ VIA LEARN
4. Christina Rossetti, ¿Passing Away, Saith the World¿. VIA LEARN.

Week 2 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Supplementary reading: excerpts from Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in the Norton edition of Jane Eyre pp. 457-65.

Week 3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1857)
Supplementary reading: Elizabeth Barrett Browning on ¿Thomas Carlyle and the Prophet-Poet¿, excerpted in the Norton edition of Aurora Leigh pp. 391-99.

Week 4 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Supplementary reading: contemporary reviews excerpted in the Norton edition of The Mill on the Floss by Craik, James, Swinburne, Ruskin, pp. 458-68.

Week 5 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61)
Supplementary reading: Christopher Ricks, ¿Great Expectations¿ in the Norton edition of the novel, pp. 668-674.

Week 6 George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)
Supplementary reading: Cynthia Grant Tucker, ¿Meredith¿s Broken Laurel¿, Victorian Poetry, 1972 pp. 351-65 (link to article on LEARN Talis Aspire).

Week 7 Love Poetry II:
1. William Morris, ¿The Defence of Guenevere¿. VIA LEARN
2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ¿Nuptial Sleep¿. VIA LEARN
3. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ¿Dolores (Our Lady of Pain)¿, Representative Poetry Online, link via LEARN
4. Michael Field, ¿Long Ago, LIV¿. VIA LEARN

Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 9 George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
Supplementary reading: Robert S. Selig, ¿¿The Valley of the Shadow of the Books¿: Alienation in Gissing¿s New Grub Street¿, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1970 pp. 188-98 (link to article via LEARN Talis Aspire).

Week 10 Arthur Wing Pinero, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895); Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895) (via LEARN)

Recommended Further Reading:

Anderson, Amanda, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
Armstrong, Isobel, Robert Browning (London: Bell, 1974)
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993)
Blair, Kirstie, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford,: Clarendon, 2006)
Bristow, Joseph, Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005)
Collini, Stefan, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
David, Deirdre, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Furneaux, Holly, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Glen, Heather, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Greiner, Rae, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2012)
Ledger, Sally, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester University Press, 1997)
Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Levine, George, The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford University Press,1994)
Pearsall, Cornelia, Tennyson¿s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Shaw, Harry, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Tucker, Herbert, A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
Additional Information
Course URL http://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
Additional Class Delivery Information Seminar: 2 hours per week for 10 weeks;
plus attendance at Autonomous Learning Group for one hour per week - at time to be arranged
KeywordsVictorian literature,fiction,poetry,drama,relationships,class,gender,education,place,religi
Contacts
Course organiserDr Katherine Inglis
Tel: (0131 6)50 3617
Email: K.Inglis@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMs Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: S.Strathdee@ed.ac.uk
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