The Victorian period (1837-1901) covers sixty-four years of unprecedented vitality and change. Literature responded to developments in science and technology, urbanisation and the growth of industrial cities, matters relating to socio-economic class and gender, the expansion of the British Empire, anxieties about rural life, and transformations of writing styles. Publication during the Victorian years increasingly involved the world of magazines and newspapers, which meant that the public was reading an almost bewildering range of reviews. Novels were usually read in instalments. Poetry was concerned with loss, crises of belief, and the increasing alienation of the imagination in a materialist world.
Students taking this module will explore a representative range of Victorian poetry and prose in order to develop their understanding of writing that evolved from the late Romantic years through to the fin de siecle.
We will read well known authors including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy alongside equally interesting, less mainstream writers such as sensation novelist Ellen Wood and
fin de siecle poet A. E. Housman. We will rethink assumptions about the Victorians and their literature, and will consider how critical studies might be taken forwards in the 21st Century.
Students taking this module will explore a representative range of Victorian poetry and prose in order to develop their understanding of writing that evolved from the late Romantic years through to the fin de siecle.
We will read well known authors including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy alongside equally interesting, less mainstream writers such as sensation novelist Ellen Wood and
fin de siecle poet A. E. Housman. We will rethink assumptions about the Victorians and their literature, and will consider how critical studies might be taken forwards in the 21st Century.