Victorian Literature

Decadence and the Modern

Tutor: Dr Donald Mackenzie
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 1, 2012-13

Giving 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.

Indicative 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 and Songs Before Sunrise
• Charles Baudelaire, selections from Les Fleurs du Mal
• Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus
• 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, Untimely Meditations and The Case of Wagner
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• 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
• James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

Victorian Literature

Explaining Change: Science and Literary Culture, 1830-1880

Tutor: Professor Alice Jenkins
Course Type: Topic Option, Semester 1 2012-13

We misread nineteenth-century literature if we isolate it from other contemporary discourses competing for cultural authority. Of these discourses the one that has featured most productively in recent critical debate is scientific writing. This course will introduce you to some of the crucial areas in the relationship of literature and science from around 1830 to 1880, focusing on attempts to explain how change happens in the world and in the individual life. Writers studied will include Darwin, Eliot, Faraday, Tennyson, Humboldt and Coleridge. No scientific knowledge will be assumed: we will read literary and scientific texts side by side to trace the movements of ideas, words and images across and between the disciplines.

Below is a sample of some of the scientific writing the course will consider. Please note, this will be an opportunity for you to use these texts to reconsider the nineteenth-century literature reading you have already done and will continue to do during the Programme.

Indicative Reading: 

• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (1859)
• William Wordsworth, 'Tintern Abbey' (1798)
• William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
• John F W Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830)
• Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834)
• William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (1847)
• George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854)
• John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843)
• John Tyndall, 'Belfast Address' (1874)
• T. H. Huxley, 'Science and Culture' (1880)
• Matthew Arnold, 'Literature and Science' (1882)

Victorian Literature

Neo-Victorianism

Tutors: Dr Christine Ferguson and members of the teaching team
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 2, 2012-13

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.

Students 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.

Indicative 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 (1969), plus Karel Reisz's film adaptation (1981)
• Michael Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
• Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
• Patricia Duncker, James Miranda Barry
• Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish
• Matthew Kneal, English Passengers (2000)
• Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
• Adam Roberts, Swiftly
• William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
• Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
• Tom Phillips, A Humument (1970 onwards)

Victorian Literature

Embodiments: Literature and Medicine, 1770-1900

Tutors: Dr. David Shuttleton and Dr. Kirstie Blair
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 2, 2012-13

Indicative Reading: 

• Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)
• Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) & Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964)
  
• Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985)
  
• Bryan S. Turner, The New Medical Sociology (2004)
  
• Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)
  
• Hannah More, ‘Sensibility’ (1782)
  
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788) & Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
  
• George Cheyne, The English Malady; or a Treatise of Nervous Disease of All Kinds
  
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition)
  
• Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794; 1796); Loves of the Plants (1789; 1791) & The Temple of Nature (1803)
  
• Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine , edited by Robert Morrison & Chris Baldick (Oxford World’s Classics)
  
• G. W. M. Reynolds, Mysteries of London (1844 on)
  
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875)
  
• Dinah (Mulock) Craik, Olive (1850)
  
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
  
• Thomas de Quincey, Confession of an English Opium Eater (1821-2; revised 1856)
  
• Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room (1844)
  
• George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859)
  
• George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60)
  
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddalo’ (1818-19)
  
• Alfred Tennyson, ‘Maud’ (1855)
  
• Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)
  
• Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1897)
  

Victorian Literature

Fictions of Adultery

Tutor: Dr. Matthew Creasy with other members of the subject area
Course Type: Topic Option
Scheduled for: Semester 2, 2012-13

Most literary study of adultery focuses upon the European novel, but there is a wealth of writing on adultery and related topics in English that has been neglected. This course examines various kinds of representation of adultery in English during the nineteenth century, from newspaper reports, legal debates and psychology to novels poems and plays. As well as considering the effects of adultery on Victorian forms and genres, it will attempt to discover the sources of critical neglect. It will both trace the ways in which adultery has been silenced in public debate and examine the ways in which adultery has been sustained within popular consciousness.

Indicative Reading:

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (1864)
  
• Ellen Wood East Lynne (1891)
  
• Anthony Trollope, He Knew He was Right (1869)
  
• Charles Dickens, Dombey & Son (1846-48)
  
• George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (1885) & Modern Love (1862)
  
• Tennyson, ‘Guinevere’ from Idylls of the King (1859); William Morris, ‘Guenevere’ (1858)
  
• Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
  
• George Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer (1893), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) & Preface to Plays Unpleasant (1898)
  
• Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) & The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895)
  
• Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904)
  
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915)
  
• Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1927)
  
• James Joyce, Exiles (1918) & Ulysses (1922)
  
• Fernand Crommelynck, The Magnificent Cuckold (1920)
  
• D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)