![[Victorian industry by River Soar Leicester]](images/CRW_1536.jpg)
![[Christina Rossetti]](images/Christina_Rossetti_2.jpg)
UPDATED: 21st
March 2007
![[The University of Leicester]](2column_red/images/unilogobuff.gif)
Modules reflect the current research interests of Centre staff. Recent options include:
We study the Victorians by getting close to the Victorians' view of themselves. Our thinking, therefore, will engage in the first place with nineteenth-century ideas - beginning with the idea of a Social Science. We will always endeavour to see these ideas as of their time and place, as befitting lived experience. Teaching will be a mixture of informal lectures and discussions, short student papers and other means of garnering empathy and understanding. Throughout, 'Victorian' will be understood as less than an epoch but more than a queen. We will go beyond her reign into a long nineteenth-century ~ 1790-1914.
The module takes three different approaches to the study of Victorian literature and culture. The first is to look at the oeuvre of a particular author, considering the development of an author's ideas and literary techniques across their career, and examining their writing in different genres. The second is to consider a particular theme in Victorian literature and culture, tracking this concern in writing (and the visual arts) across the entire period, and examining how the theme is dealt with in radically different ways in a variety of genres. The third is to focus on a particular portion of the Victorian age, attempting to understand how literary texts produced in that historical 'moment' engaged both with contemporary events and with each other.
![[Evolution]](images/evolutionentropy.jpg)
It is increasingly recognised that the sciences formed a fundamental and integral part of Victorian culture, and that their growing importance was registered in a variety of literary forms. The aim of this module is to introduce students to this exciting area of interdisciplinary study by situating a variety of literary texts, including works by Dickens, Gaskell, Hardy, H.G. Wells, and Stoker, within the context of key nineteenth-century scientific debates. These will include the nature of life, evolution, degeneration and entropy, and the occult. The module will consider how the enormous scientific changes that took place during the period were represented in a multiplicity of different ways, and examine how nineteenth-century literature enacted the transition from the optimism of mid-Victorian science to the pessimism of later scientific enterprises. Students will additionally be encouraged to consider how scientific writing of the period uses literary structures and fictional devices, and is subject to a corresponding instability of meaning.
The module is in two parts: (i) urbanisation: the nature and development of the built environment of Victorian cities; and (ii) the moral environment. Various themes run through both segments: (a) perceptions and images of the city; (b) working and living conditions and relationships and changes in them; and (c) policy and its implementation. These themes are investigated by studying many aspects of Victorian life - housing, health, education and child rescue movements, worship, family and community life, local government and public policy, leisure and recreation. The course will be taught by a combination of lectures, seminars and some visual material.
This module explores nineteenth-century life-writing through a wide variety of biographical and autobiographical texts, including literary Lives, working-class oral life histories, biography as a Victorian institution (The Dictionary of National Biography), female autobiography, family memoir and fictionalised autobiography. We will look at the construction of the self, issues of censorship, auto/biographical anxieties and the influence of class and gender in Victorian life-writing. Indicative authors, subject to availability of texts, are: Lytton Strachey, Thomas De Quincey, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Mayhew, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton, Edmund Gosse, Samuel Butler. (A full list of primary and secondary texts will be available before the start of the module.)
This module consists of a reading of selected works of five major women writers; three novelists and two poets: Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti, all of whom were prominent in the 1850s and 1860s and each of whom has been the subject of recent feminist criticism. The position of the woman writer, the problems, challenges and achievements will be considered in the light of this criticism. Texts of each will be discussed in relation to nineteenth century writing as a whole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Christina_Rossetti_2.jpg
This course introduces key subjects, questions and approaches for the comparative analysis of regional cultural history in England and Wales between the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. These will include attitudes to gender and family, landscape painting, regional literature, Victorian photography, religious geographies, anthropological approaches, gypsies and alternative cultures. Sessions on early modern paleography will concentrate on the practical ability to read documents in secretary hand which may either be considered as cultural texts in their own right or which provide information on, for example, material culture.
Like much of Europe, England experienced a dramatic renaissance in the 1890s with the plays of A.W. Pinero, H.A. Jones, G.B. Shaw and Oscar Wilde. These dramatists were followed by Granville Barker, Galsworthy, Gita Sowerby and D.H. Lawrence. The period 1890 to 1914 saw the transition from "high society" drama to plays about the lives of ordinary folk; the dominance of West End actor-managers was challenged by the Independent Theatre, the Stage Society, Vedrenne and Barker at the Court Theatre and the beginning of the repertory movement. We shall begin with A.W. Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), which provides a backwards look at the theatre of the 1860s; thereafter the approach will be generic and thematic, dealing with melodrama, the depiction of women, religious and social drama.
![[Dickens sketch]](images/dickens.jpg)
This option aims to engage you with a wide range of Dickens’s writings from the 1830s –1860s, exploring his work as novelist, journalist, travel writer and editor. We shall also consider conditions of production and reception, examining a long tradition of visual/verbal dialogue from the conversations between Dickens’s prose and the first illustrations and frontispieces, to the critical relationship between Dickens’s work and recent film and television adaptations. The course will also introduce you to recent critical reassessments of the work of Dickens. In particular, we shall be looking at new responses to representations of class, gender, sexuality, embodiment, ‘race’ and place in Dickens, and how these concerns relate to other contemporaneous debates in the nineteenth century.
This module discusses comparatively the structures and features of local societies and economies, teaching appropriate research skills, and considering the changes that occurred before, during, and after industrialisation. Subjects covered include welfare provision, historical demography and migration, agricultural change, the Victorian city, modern community studies and oral history. Sources examined include listings of inhabitants, the census, records and welfare and the poor law.
This module will consider the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its followers, examining such issues as typological symbolism, the relationship between literature and art, patronage and the representation of women. The problem of 'reading' Pre-Raphaelite paintings within social, political and religious discourses will also be examined.
This module includes dedicated sessions on the Theory of Copy Text; Sociology of Texts; Shakespeare's 'King Lear'; Milton's Lycidas; and Pope's Homer.