The Victorian Experience: Texts and Contexts

In this double module, you will engage with Victorian texts and their various contexts in both breadth and depth. Material representing a wide generic and chronological range within the period is covered, and from the outset textual study is embedded in an examination of key historical developments and the issues – political, social, cultural and intellectual – to which these developments gave rise and currency.

What does the module cover?

Initially, the main literary focus is on poetry, but the sequence of studies of notable poets such as Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clough, Arnold, Meredith, the Rossettis and Swinburne is interspersed at appropriate points with consideration of relevant contextual topics and debates: industrialisation and urbanisation, science and religion, cultural values, and gender issues.

In your first assessment element, a submitted critical comparison of passages of verse and/or prose, you’ll be invited to display skills of textual analysis (including a sensitivity to generic conventions and stylistic distinctions) and secondarily, a knowledge of relevant contexts. The module then focuses on mid-Victorian fiction; novels by, for example, Dickens and Gaskell, offer different models of realism and different versions of a search for identity to compare with reference to contextual issues introduced earlier. The second assessment element is a submitted essay on the fiction studied.

The remainder of this module is given to literary and contextual developments in the late Victorian period: generic innovations (the ‘new’ drama of, for example, Wilde and Shaw, short stories by, for example, Kipling, Vernon Lee and Olive Schreiner) are assessed in relation to contextual novelties: the new woman, the new imperialism, socialism and aestheticism. Your skills in handling material covered in the latter part of the module will be tested in an end-of-semester examination, the questions in which are made available in advance.        

Key Topics

• Victorian poetry comparatively analysed in terms of generic, stylistic, tonal and thematic characteristics
• Mid-Victorian fiction comparatively assessed in similar ways, with particular regard to models of realism
• Historical developments and issues constituting major contextual considerations in the study of Victorian literature
• The distinctive features of late Victorian literature, assessed in relation to social, political and cultural changes

Prerequisites

None

Number of credits and study time

30 credits, equivalent to 300 hours of study.

Assessment

Assessment for this module will comprise one or more tasks, which will take the form of an exam and/ or coursework  (essay, report or presentation).