This module is an optional period module at Level 5. We will study key texts from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that register the ways in which Britain is transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and which give expression to fears about technology, social mobility and urban culture. We will consider literature of the period that questions and resists established theories of gendered identity, and which challenges the literary representation of sexuality, defying censorship in the process. We will be introduced to writers who engage with contemporary debates about science, religion, the empire, and racial and national identity. And we will encounter a range of consciously modern texts which dislocate and make new the reader's experience by technical innovation and experiment. In recent years, writers studied have included Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Students will study a range of Victorian and Modernist poetry selected from an anthology such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. They will also encounter a diverse set of novels from the long nineteenth century, for example Oliver Twist (1838) to Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), in order to chart the development of literary representations of the fallen woman and to open up discussion about sexual morality and literary censorship. Fictional texts will also be studied in relation to non-fiction texts, for example Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) and Mary Seacole's mid-century autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, in order to develop our understanding of topics such as female subjectivity and cultural perceptions of the woman writer. Having acquired a solid grounding in the conventions of nineteenth-century literature, students will then proceed to examine the works of a number of Modernist writers, including key novels of the early twentieth century and inter-war period which make a deliberate break from such conventions and through various forms of experimentation attempt to represent individual consciousness with greater authenticity. Texts might include Conrad's Lord Jim, Lawrence's, Sons and Lovers, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
The class will meet for a one-hour interactive lecture which will situate the literature of the Victorian to Modernist periods within appropriate historical, cultural and theoretical contexts. In some weeks the lecture will be replaced with a workshop which will enable students to work in small groups on questions raised in the previous week's lecture. The class will then divide into seminar groups which will be centred around class discussion and will involve close readings of the texts. The seminar will be based on the principles of collaborative learning, where classes will be structured to promote active learning and individual engagement with the texts.
| Definitive UNISTATS Category | Indicative Description | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 22 two-hour interactive lectures 22 one-hour seminars | 44 22 |
| Scheduled learning and teaching | Guided Independent Learning | 234 |
| Total (number of credits x 10) | 300 | |
The summative assessment for this module comprises of a portfolio (50%) and take home test(50%). For the purposes of illustration, the portfolio might be composed of the following elements:
1) Online Discussion Board/Seminar Discussion Sheets
2) Essay
Formative assessments involve a variety of oral presentations in-class, active participation in workshops and seminars, weekly inquiry sheets, and meetings with the module leader and module tutors during independent study. Feedback will provided through peer review and by the module tutors. All assignments for formative assessment will be forward-led and focused on promoting students' progress in developing critical and communication skills throughout the year. The critical skills gained in this module will be tested in a variety of summative assessments within the portfolio and are designed to complement the work done by students in the two core Level 5 modules as well as feeding forward into the Level 6 Capstone module.
| Learning Outcome | Assessment Strategy |
|---|---|
| Demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the conventions and characteristics of Victorian and Modernist literature | Portfolio Exercises and Take Home Test |
| Show an awareness of the ways in which Victorian and Modernist literature engages with key issues in the period | Portfolio Exercises and Take Home Test |
| Read and analyse literary texts with depth and critical insight | Portfolio Exercises and Take Home Test |
| Write critically informed and thoughtfully analytical essays | Portfolio Exercises and Take Home Test |
It IS a requirement that the major category of assessment is passed in order to achieve an overall pass for the module
Francis O'Gorman, Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993)
Attridge, Derek, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983)
Boyd, Kelly and Rohan McWilliam, eds., The Victorian Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007)
Cunningham, Valentine, ed., Victorians: Poetry and Poetics – A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)
David, Deidre, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Gilmour, Robin, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830-1890 (London: Longman,1993)
Howarth, Peter, Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Hughes, Linda K., ed., The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Leighton, Angela, ed., Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,1996)
Levine, George, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (London: Harvard University Press,1988)
Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
O'Gorman, Francis, The Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
Susan Sellers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Stape, J.H., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Tew, Philip and Alex Murray, eds., The Modernist Handbook (London: Continuum, 2009)
Tosh, John, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)
Widdowson, Peter, ed., D.H.Lawrence (London: Longman, 1992)