| Unit name | Charles Dickens (1812-1870) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL30084 |
| Credit points | 30 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. James |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
Normally, the successful completion of appropriate Level 2 English units. Note to Study Abroad Students: if you are considering joining this course shortly before its commencement and have not studied Dickens previously, please bear in mind that students in the English Department will have chosen this option several months in advance and will have been required to read at least two long novels before the course begins; consequently, you may have difficulties keeping up with the reading requirements. Please direct any queries to Dr Stephen James in the English Department |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Dickens has been regarded as both a crowd-pleasing sensationalist and a highly sophisticated literary innovator. This unit seeks to put these and other definitions of the author to the test. Among the topics for exploration will be: artifice and caricature; violence, the grotesque and the carnivalesque; sexuality and repression; Dickens's women; the figure of the orphan or neglected child; the conventions of melodrama; strategies of suspense; tropes and techniques of revelation and concealment; the darkening vision of the later work. In addition to tracing the contemporary public and critical reception of Dickens's fictions and relating these to the works of his peers, the course will touch upon a number of twentieth-century critical perspectives: Marxist, feminist, historicist and psychoanalytical.
