Unit Unit Code Credit points FHEQ level Prerequisites Faculty Unit leader 1a LITERATURE 1830-­‐1900 NCH410 30 Level 4 None ENGLISH Dr Catherine Brown DESCRIPTION This course aims to give knowledge of a range of texts from the nineteenth century, an understanding of their social and cultural contexts, and the interpretative skills necessary to give sophisticated descriptions of them. AIMS The course aims to give: • A knowledge of a range of texts from the nineteenth century across all three genres (poetry, prose, and drama). • An understanding of the social and cultural contexts of these texts. • The knowledge and skills to identify and understand the key formal and thematic characteristics of the literature of the period. • The skills necessary to give sophisticated descriptions of texts from the period. LEARNING OUTCOMES On successful completion of the unit, students should have/be able to: Knowledge and understanding K1a A knowledge of a range of texts in each of the genres of prose, poetry, and drama from period. K2a An understanding of how this literature and its genres are related to relevant cultural and historical contexts. 1 K2a An understanding of the historical development of a number of literary genres (including the realistic novel, Condition of English fiction, aestheticism). K2a A sense of what is distinctive in the literature and concerns of the Victorian period. K2a A knowledge of other critics’ interpretations of the period and its literature. Subject-­‐specific skills S2a Present ideas concerning the literature of the period. S3a Approach the literature of the period in ways which are appropriate to its particular nature. Transferable skills T1a Present arguments in verbal and written form. T2a Familiarity with some literary and critical material. T3a With guidance, chart one’s own course through the study of the period. LEARNING AND TEACHING This Level 4 course is taught in the Hilary term with one two-­‐hour lecture and one one-­‐hour, one-­‐to-­‐one tutorial each week. Lectures are typically highly interactive – i.e. they are ‘lectimars’, and incorporate many of the processes of a seminar. There will be a revision session in the Trinity term. Unit information and supplementary materials are available through the Moodle VLE ‘Literature 1830-­‐1900’ section. Students are required to attend and participate in all the formal and timetabled sessions for this unit. Students are also expected to manage their directed learning and independent study in support of the unit. The lecturer of this unit will draw students’ attention to, and as appropriate lead trips to, buildings, museums, festivals, plays and exhibitions pertaining to this period in London. ASSESSMENT Formative Eight weekly essays written over the course of Hilary term. A large degree of freedom is given in the authors and texts written about; more direction is given in what types of literature (e.g. ‘the realistic novel’) or topics (e.g. ‘religion in Victorian literature’) are discussed. A student is therefore expected to chart their own way through the unit according to their particular interests and critical aptitudes. Essay-­‐writing compels the students to articulate their thoughts at an early stage of their engagement with these texts; makes them practise and develop their essay-­‐writing technique; and provides a basis for a discussion with tutors in which their ideas will be taken further. 2 The tutor will also give advice on further thought and reading, and on essay-­‐writing -­‐ all of which will constitute good preparation for the examination. Summative 48-­‐hour take home examination. The question paper is released online at noon on a particular day, and by noon two days later answers must be uploaded by students to Moodle. The exam paper resembles units 1B and 2A in its structure. Section A questions (from which the student must choose two) are based upon themes; it is up to the student to select upon which authors to write, but one answer must concern poems, and the other must concern novels. Section B consists of an extract from a play, which must be discussed in relation to the drama, and other concerns, of the period. The assessment criteria are: - showing knowledge of a range of texts in each of the genres of prose, poetry, and drama from the period (this is examined by obliging students to write on each of these genres); - showing an understanding of how this literature and its genres are related to relevant cultural and historical contexts (this is examined particularly in Section B by requiring an extract of drama to be situated in relation to the concerns of the period); - showing an understanding of the historical development of a number of literary genres including the emergence of realism, and developments in serial publication of the novel (this will be examined through thematic questions in Section A), and a sense of what is distinctive in the literature and concerns of the Victorian period (this will be examined particularly in Section B by requiring an extract of drama to be situated in relation to the concerns of the period). The following will be assessed in both sections: - a knowledge of other critics’ interpretations of the period and its literature; - the interpretative models and critical terms necessary to read the particular texts studied on the unit; - the ability to become familiar with a wide range of material; and - the ability to empathise with the concerns and values of a period distant in time from one’s own. INDICATIVE READING Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists for units are produced annually in Subject Handbooks or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is used as part of the approval/modification process only. Primary Elizabeth G, (2006), Mary Barton, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Gorman, F. (ed.) (2004), Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell. 3 Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Plays, intro. by H. Montgomery Hyde (1998), London: Methuen. Secondary Gilmour, R. (1994), The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1890, London: Longman. Flint, K. (ed.) (1987), The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change, London: Croom Helm. Gilbert, S. M. and Gubar S. (2000), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­‐Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press. INDICATIVE TOPICS 1. Introduction to the Victorian period, Publication, and Readers This lecture will start with an overview of Victorian social, political, and literary history, and post-­‐Victorian attitudes towards the period. It will then consider the following aspects of Victorian literature: developments in printing technology, the rise of literacy, the rise of the novel, lending libraries, serialisation, the multi-­‐volume novel, Bowdlerisation, the importance of bourgeois female readers, correspondence between readers and authors, copyright, money to be made from authorship, the author as celebrity, and public readings. A Victorian, and a modern, edition of a Victorian novel will be handled and compared by the students. 2. Social Problem Novel This lecture will introduce some of the social problems produced by urbanisation and industrialisation in the period, and then consider the response of literary authors to these problems. There will be particular concentration on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, but students will also be encouraged to read and write about any of: Charles Dickens’s, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and Bleak House; Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South; Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley; and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke. 3. Gender This lecture will consider how gender is constructed and debated in Victorian poetry, including for example Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Rime of the Duchess May’ and ‘Amy’s Cruelty’, Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Eurydice to Orpheus: A Picture by Leighton’, Adelaide Procter’s ‘A Legend of Provence’ and ‘Philip and Mildred’, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘An Apple-­‐Gathering’, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’ and ‘The Blessed Damozel’. Both Victorian and post-­‐Victorian debates about gender in the period will be considered. 4. Realism and moralism This lecture will begin with an overview of the history of realism as a concept in philosophy and, separately, in aesthetics. It will point out that realistic works constitute a tiny minority of the world’s literature, and that various limitations and contradictions are inherent in the idea as well as the practice of literature mirroring life. Theories of realism articulated by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and MH Abrams will be considered. The relationship of realism to moralism will be considered in the abstract, and then examined in the concrete in relation to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 4 5. Victorian faith and doubt This lecture will first give an overview of the position of the Anglican Church, and its Nonconformist and Catholic alternatives, in England throughout the period. It will then consider the threats to religious faith raised by the New Criticism, geology, the development theory, and psychology (although Larsen’s counter-­‐thesis concerning the Crisis of Doubt will be noted). Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma and J.S. Mill’s Three Essays on Religion will be given as examples of philosophical responses to the challenges to Christianity in the period. The interaction of faith and doubt in Tennyson’s In Memoriam will then be explored in some detail, as a basis for subsequent individual student work on texts such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and ‘De Profundis’. 6. Aestheticism This lecture will introduce the origins of the aesthetic movement by considering a few pre-­‐
Raphaelite poems (for example poems by Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and William Morris). It will then move on to an examination of the ideas of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and works by Arthur Symons and Algernon Swinburne. The dictum ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ will be interrogated, and its relations to religion and politics considered. 7. Victorian theatre This lecture will concentrate on the dramatic works of Oscar Wilde understood in relation not only to the aesthetic movement discussed in the previous lecture, but also to the context of earlier Victorian theatre: the range of types of theatres, theatre-­‐goers, performances, new plays, and theatre genres; and the role of theatre critics, actor-­‐managers, and censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. Wilde’s continuities with and differences from earlier Victorian theatre will be considered. 8. Empire This lecture will begin by reflecting on the fact that most Victorian literature does not concern the British Empire; rather, much of it is domestic both in the sense of focusing on Britain, and in being set in the home. However, British domestic life was underpinned by the Empire, and some literature, especially towards the end of the period, explored it. The lecture will compare attitudes towards imperialism and native peoples in works such as Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Defense of Lucknow’, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), and Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). INDICATIVE ASSIGNMENT QUESTIONS Section A 1. I dare not hope with David’s harp to chase The evil spirit from the troubled breast; Enough for me if I can find such grace To listen to the strain, and be at rest. (JOHN KEBLE) Explore the relationship between aesthetic form and religious faith in Victorian literature. 2. ‘I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an esquire! Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position’ (CHARLOTTE BRONTË) Discuss uncertainty about gender in Victorian literature. 5 Section B Discuss the following extract in relation to Victorian drama, and any other of the period’s literary and social concerns: Miss Prism. Do not speak slightingly of the three-­‐volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily. Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. Cecily. I suppose so. But it seems very unfair. And was your novel ever published? Miss Prism. Alas! no. The manuscript unfortunately was abandoned. [Cecily starts.] I use the word in the sense of lost or mislaid. To your work, child, these speculations are profitless. Cecily. [Smiling.] But I see dear Dr. Chasuble coming up through the garden. Miss Prism. [Rising and advancing.] Dr. Chasuble! This is indeed a pleasure. [Enter Canon Chasuble.] Chasuble. And how are we this morning? Miss Prism, you are, I trust, well? Cecily. Miss Prism has just been complaining of a slight headache. I think it would do her so much good to have a short stroll with you in the Park, Dr. Chasuble. Miss Prism. Cecily, I have not mentioned anything about a headache. Cecily. No, dear Miss Prism, I know that, but I felt instinctively that you had a headache. Indeed I was thinking about that, and not about my German lesson, when the Rector came in. Chasuble. I hope, Cecily, you are not inattentive. Cecily. Oh, I am afraid I am. Chasuble. That is strange. Were I fortunate enough to be Miss Prism’s pupil, I would hang upon her lips. [Miss Prism glares.] I spoke metaphorically.—My metaphor was drawn from bees. Ahem! Mr. Worthing, I suppose, has not returned from town yet? Miss Prism. We do not expect him till Monday afternoon. Chasuble. Ah yes, he usually likes to spend his Sunday in London. He is not one of those whose sole aim is enjoyment, as, by all accounts, that unfortunate young man his brother seems to be. But I must not disturb Egeria and her pupil any longer. Miss Prism. Egeria? My name is Lætitia, Doctor. Chasuble. [Bowing.] A classical allusion merely, drawn from the Pagan authors. I shall see you both no doubt at Evensong? 6 Miss Prism. I think, dear Doctor, I will have a stroll with you. I find I have a headache after all, and a walk might do it good. Chasuble. With pleasure, Miss Prism, with pleasure. We might go as far as the schools and back. Miss Prism. That would be delightful. Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side. [Goes down the garden with Dr. Chasuble.] Cecily. [Picks up books and throws them back on table.] Horrid Political Economy! Horrid Geography! Horrid, horrid German! [Enter Merriman with a card on a salver.] Merriman. Mr. Ernest Worthing has just driven over from the station. He has brought his luggage with him. Cecily. [Takes the card and reads it.] ‘Mr. Ernest Worthing, B. 4, The Albany, W.’ Uncle Jack’s brother! Did you tell him Mr. Worthing was in town? Merriman. Yes, Miss. He seemed very much disappointed. I mentioned that you and Miss Prism were in the garden. He said he was anxious to speak to you privately for a moment. Cecily. Ask Mr. Ernest Worthing to come here. I suppose you had better talk to the housekeeper about a room for him. Merriman. Yes, Miss. [Merriman goes off.] Cecily. I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else. [Enter Algernon, very gay and debonnair.] He does! Algernon. [Raising his hat.] You are my little cousin Cecily, I’m sure. Cecily. You are under some strange mistake. I am not little. In fact, I believe I am more than usually tall for my age. [Algernon is rather taken aback.] But I am your cousin Cecily. You, I see from your card, are Uncle Jack’s brother, my cousin Ernest, my wicked cousin Ernest. Algernon. Oh! I am not really wicked at all, cousin Cecily. You mustn’t think that I am wicked. Cecily. If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) 7 SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT STRUCTURE Assessment type: Take-­‐home Examination Weighting: 100% On-­‐line submission: Yes Duration: 48 hours Length: N/A Date of validation Date last modified Finally approved by the Southampton Solent University Academic Standards and Development Committee 19 November 2014. 8