Postgraduate Course: The Victorians and the Past (ENLI11136)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Few things can tell us more about a society than its sense of the past. Much of what we think of as modern had its origins in the Victorian and Edwardian period, but the Victorians and Edwardians themselves were obsessed with what came before. And for good reason. New disciplines such as geology, palaeontology, 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 poetry, fiction and non-fictional texts. We will examine literature as one part of a complex interdisciplinary network of knowledge creation, and explore how writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past. |
| Course description |
The course will look at:
1. Prehistory
2. Ancient Civilisations, including Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome
3. National Origins, including King Arthur and the Saxons, Vikings and Normans
Four full-length 'time-travel' texts focusing on the encounter between modernity and the past - two children's books and two works of popular romance - will be placed in the context of a wide array of historical and scientific documents, poems and short stories.
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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
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| Academic year 2026/27, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| 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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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
One essay of 4,000 words |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
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
Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
Further primary and secondary readings will be made available via Learn.
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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 Kara McCormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Kara.McCormack@ed.ac.uk |
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