zz Victorian Literature example

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Scott, Dickens, Eliot

Tutors: Dr Donald Mackenzie, Dr Matthew Creasy, Dr Kirstie Blair
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 1, 2010-11

bleak houseThis course aims to introduce students to three of the major novelists of the nineteenth century, and to consider the lines of influence and resistance that run from Walter Scott’s enormously influential works in the early nineteenth century to George Eliot’s novels of the 1860s and beyond. Besides considering three specific authors, this course will introduce students to theories of the novel and its development, using Scott, Dickens and Eliot as test cases to interrogate questions of genre (historical novels, romances, ‘classic realist’ novels, novels of political and social engagement), publication circumstances and book production and marketing (serial publication, the role of Victorian periodicals and journalism, illustration, reviews, the commodification of the author), readership, and the perceived function of the novel in this period. In addition, by considering how Dickens and Eliot responded to Scott and to each other, we will assess the development of recurring themes within the novel - including issues of class, gender, religion and nationality - and examine how these themes changed and were reworked in the decades between the start of the Victorian period and its mid-point.

Core reading

  • Walter Scott, Guy Mannering
  • Walter Scott, Kenilworth
  • Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian
  • Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
  • Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers
  • Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
  • George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
  • George Eliot, Adam Bede 
  • George Eliot, Romola

zz Victorian Literature example

Embodiments: Literature and Medicine 1750-1900

Tutors: Dr David Shuttleton and Dr Kirstie Blair

brain'Embodiments' aims to introduce students to a wider historical perspective by moving from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. It seeks to explore critical approaches and theoretical models of relevance when addressing literary representations of embodiment and related medical discourses, and to encourage students to engage in independent interdisciplinary research in the fields of literature and medicine, as well as introducing them to the growing field of disability studies. By considering a wide range of texts from a variety of different genres, students will be enabled to identify and examine shifts in medical discourse across time and the changing ways in which literary and medical writers interact as medicine becomes a more professionalized and specialized discourse. The course highlights both change and continuity and by including texts from different literary ‘periods’ it also raises questions about periodization: is ‘Romantic’ medicine different to ‘Victorian’ medicine, and is the body read and interpreted in different ways within different historical contexts? The course additionally raises important questions about gender, sexuality, race and class and their perceived relations to the pathologized body. Topic that we will focus on include vitalism, nervous sensibility, corpses and body-snatching, disability and deformity, contagious diseases, sensationalism, insanity and hysteria.

Core reading

  • Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and/or Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 text, in Oxford World's Classics introduced by Marilyn Butler)
  • Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine (Oxford World's Classics, edited by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick)
  • Robert Browning, 'Gold Hair; A Story at Pornic'
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'The Leper'
  • Charles Lamb, from Last Essays of Elia
  • Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady
  • Walter Scott, from Chronicles of the Canongate
  • Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
  • Thomas De Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House
  • George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’
  • Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick-Room
  • George Henry Lewes, from The Physiology of Common Life
  • Alfred Tennyson, 'Maud'
  • P. B. Shelley, 'Julian and Maddalo'
  • Erasmus Darwin, Loves of the Plants (The Botantic Garden)
  • M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret

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Decadence and the Modern

Tutor: Dr Donald Mackenzie, with members of the department.
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 2, 2010-11

city viewGiving his 1857 Inaugural Lecture, 'On the Modern Element in Literature', as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Matthew Arnold picked out, as defining elements of a modern consciousness, the desire for an intellectual deliverance and a restless ennui. Both halves of this module begin with a mapping of that modern consciousness: at mid-century, and some decades later. Both halves go on to explore the development of that consciousness into Decadence. Individual seminars bring together a range of different texts and genres. Items from Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1865) – a cardinal mid-Victorian Text – and from Pater's seminal Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) are threaded through several seminars. Since some of the classic analyses of decadence and of the modern are continental European, the seminars take Baudelaire and Huysmans alongside and over against Swinburne and Wilde, Nietzsche alongside and over against Arnold, Rimbaud and Verlaine with English writers of the fin-de-siecle. (All the continental texts proposed are currently available in English.) The module ends with the counter-Decadent fantasy novels of Chesterton, a late Victorian/Edwardian who, like Yeats, has been powerfully shaped by the 1890s.

Core Reading

  • Matthew Arnold, selected poems and prose writing including selections from Essays in Criticism
  • Walter Pater, selected prose writings including selections from Studies in the History of the Renaissance
  • Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, selections from Poems and Ballads
  • Charles Baudelaire, selections from Les Fleurs du Mal
  • Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill
  • George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, selections from Twilight of the Idols
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
  • Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
  • H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
  • Arthur Symons, selected writings
  • Selection of decadent poetry by Verlaine, Rimbaud, Dowson, and Yeats.
  • G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill; The Man Who Was Thursday

zz Victorian Literature example

Neo-Victorianism

Tutors: Dr Kirstie Blair and members of the department
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 2, 2010-11

This exciting and innovative course focuses on the afterlife of Victorian literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and particularly on the increasing interest in Victorian literature and Victoriana evident in the last two decades. It will explore issues of appropriation, adaptation and commodification and will encourage participants to view the nineteenth century in a longer context and through the lens of twentieth-century critical theory.

victorian vaseStudents will be able to trace literary engagement with the Victorian novel (and other genres) from postmodernist and feminist reworkings in the 1960s and 1970s, to queer rewritings in the early twenty-first century and the current vogue for detective fiction, romance novels and fantasy fiction set in Victorian times. We will also consider the emerging genre of 'steampunk' and its roots in the science fiction and utopian/dystopian works of the late nineteenth century, plus the vital role of Neo-Victorianism in recent developments in children's and young adult fiction, as well in award-winning and influential graphic novels, films and other media. Students on this course will be encouraged to explore further aspects of popular culture (for instance television, music, fashion and burlesque) for themselves. Uniquely on the Victorian M.Litt, students have the option to produce a piece of creative writing or a project in other media (a website, for example), for their final assessment should they wish to do so.

In 2007-8 we spent over £1000 on building a collection of over one hundred films, novels and graphic novels in this field, which is reserved for the use of students on the Victorian M.Litt.

Course Reading

The course will consider a range of theoretical writing on neo-Victorianism, by those such as Frederic Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Simon Joyce and Cora Kaplan. This will then be used to contextualise our discussion of neo-Victorian texts such as:
  • John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
  • A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
  • Michael Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
  • Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
  • Patricia Duncker, James Miranda Barry
  • George MacDonald Fraser's 'Flashman' books
  • Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire
  • Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
  • Neil Gaiman, "A Study in Emerald"
  • Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
  • Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
  • Adam Roberts, Swiftly
  • Philip Pullman, The Shadow in the North
  • William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
  • Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
  • Tom Phillips, A Humument