Code 22328
Level of study Second Year
Credit value 20
Semester 2
Pre-requisite modules You must have completed at least one year of appropriate study in this discipline
The Victorians were both explorers and reformers, imagining and discovering new worlds while also bringing them into being. This module explores the way the Victorians created the world through their writing, whether this was in describing new lands, reexamining those familiar to them, exploring the psyche, or speculating on the unknown. In order to encompass the diverse ways in which the world was encountered, conceived and described in the nineteenth century, the module encompasses a wide range of literary and non-literary writing, with sessions devoted to the sensation novel, realist fiction, poetic form, and the industrial novel; as well as to correspondence, contributions to the periodical press, science writing, and questions of aesthetics posed by pre-Raphaelitism. Possible texts include Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; poetry from Arnold, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti; and short stories and verse by Rudyard Kipling. We will also read at least one nineteenth-century work in serial parts, probably Rider Haggard’s She.