Module description
The Victorians were very aware of their own modernity. It made them proud, but it also made them anxious. They felt they were hurtling forwards, making giant leaps of progress in art, literature, technology, science and politics. But they also worried about sexuality, race, class, religion, environmental damage, slavery and labour, democracy and liberalism: all issues which still exercise us today. The Britain of 1880 looked entirely different to the Britain of 1840. The Victorians and the Making of the Modern World takes this critical period, 1840-1880, and explores the ways in which literature is both registering and shaping modernity. This is the period in which a 'mass society' and a mass media first start to emerge, the period when electronic communications technologies first start to connect the world, and the period when British Empire is expanding and subjugating more and more people across the globe. This module aims to introduce you to the Victorian period and to some of the live current debates about this crucial period in the making of modernity.
On this module we study two classic Victorian novels alongside poetry, drama, essays, scientific writing, and paintings and visual material. The course will demonstrate the extraordinary range of experimentation in Victorian literary writing and art in this period. We will give two weeks to each of the novels to explore their different aspects. For example, we read Dickens's Dombey and Son (1846-1848) to think about modernity and machines in the 1840s, but also to think about the sea and the maritime nature of the British empire. Gaskell's North and South (1854-1855) opens up questions of gender, class and democracy, but in our second week we will use this story of cotton mills in Manchester to think about American slavery and race. Other seminars will be spent finding out what the Victorians thought and felt about nature, gardens, animals (we have a special frog week), science, sexual pleasure and pain, religion, the violence of British imperialism, environmental exploitation, a growing commodity culture, capitalism, and the changing status of women. We will think about the role of 'realism' as it morphs into 'aestheticism' in literature and painting and we will consider the ways in which these aesthetic forms were politicized at the time. The course is arranged broadly chronologically, and week by week we will use our reading to track the ways in which culture, art and literature change radically across this 40-year period.
Assessment details
1 x 3000-word essay at end of semester. There will also be a mid-semester formative (unassessed) assignment.
Educational aims & objectives
By the end of the module, students will:
- Gain familiarity with a broad range of literary texts, visual artworks and material artifacts produced in the period 1840–1880, and understand these texts in their historical, social and cultural contexts.
- Engage in the close study of five emblematic texts of Victorian literature, and develop skills to independently interpret them.
- Consider why writers might have chosen particular literary and generic forms for representing social conditions, and think about what these forms enable or inhibit; develop an ability to critique these forms, using a variety of different methodologies and theoretical perspectives.
- Engage critically with a variety of literary forms and cultures to think about the different ways in which individual writers and artists brought about, as well as reflected on, social change.
- Deepen our understanding of concepts such as gender and sexuality, the body, colonialism, biopolitics, madness, affect and posthumanism.
- Become acquainted with central critical and theoretical debates structuring the field of nineteenth-century studies today.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 5 module, and in particular will be able to:
1. Analyse and critically evaluate texts from a range of different genres written in the mid-nineteenth century.
2. Demonstrate awareness and understanding of the political, intellectual and social contexts of the period.
3. Analyse and critically evaluate a range of theoretical work that is currently reconceptualising our approach to nineteenth-century fiction.
4. Demonstrate knowledge of the changing nature of Victorian studies.
5. Communicate reading and research effectively, through seminar discussion and written work, with a particular focus on honing scholarly writing, argumentation and depth of analytical thinking.
Teaching pattern
1 hour seminar & 1 hour lecture weekly
Suggested reading list
Core reading (to be purchased, borrowed or downloaded as ebooks):
- Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1846-1848)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854-1855)
We will begin with Dickens’s Dombey and Son, so please ensure you have read this in advance of the start of the course. It is by no means Dickens’s longest novel but it is not short, so if give yourself enough time you can read it in the way that it was originally intended to be read – in parts – and across a stretch of time. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South was also originally published in parts too (in Dickens’s weekly periodical Household Words).