Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues

Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues

Course title: Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues
Instructor: Prof. Borislav Knežević
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 3^rd and 5^th
Enrolment requirements: Introduction to Study of English Literature 1 and 2
Course description: This course is designed as an introduction to Victorian literature. The reading is made up by texts by representative works of some of the most important Victorian writers, and it covers the important genres of the period (fiction, poetry, nonfiction prose). The course will attempt to define the central themes of Victorian literature, that have to do with Victorian social makeup, industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, construction of gender roles, and professionalization of writing. Much of our work will be conducted through a close reading of formal and historical properties of the selected texts.
Objectives: The course places an emphasis on active student engagement with the literary text, in order for the students to master the skills of interpreting literary text. One of the important goals of this course is to allow students to improve their skills of written analysis of literature.
Course requirements: The grade is based on continuous evaluation: an essay in the second half of the term (5 pages), a mid-term quiz and a quiz at the end of term.

Week by week schedule:

1. week: Victorian poetry: Tennyson.1. week: Introduction to the Victorian age. Periodization, historical context; main genres of Victorian literature.
2. week: Victorian poetry: Tennyson.
3. week: Victorian poetry: Browning.
4. week: Victorian poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
5. week: Victorian novel: professionalization of novel writing. The structure of the literary field and the literary market. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.
6. week: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford”.
7. week: Gaskell, North and South. Industrial novel as a Victorian genre.
8. week: First quiz. Gaskell, North and South. Social geography in the novel.
9. week: Gaskell. Victorian class system: Cannadine.
10. week: Social ethnography: Frances Trollope, Thackeray, Mayhew. Social criticism: Carlyle, J.S. Mill.
11. week: Social criticism: Ruskin, art and political economy.
12. week: Criticism: Arnold. Essay due.
13. week: Victorian poetry: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Arnold
14. week: Victorian poetry: Arnold.
15. week: Second quiz. Course evaluation.

 

Reading:

Poetry:
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulyssess,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Love Among the Ruins”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (selected poems)
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” “The Buried Life”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Burden of Nineveh”

Non-fiction prose:
Thomas Carlyle,“Condition of England,” from Past and Present
W.M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (selection)
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (selection)
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Preface)

Fiction:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford,” North and South

Historical context:
David Cannadine, “A Viable Hierarchical Society,” from The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.