| Unit name | Victorian Afterlives |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGLM3035 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Lee |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
none |
| Co-requisites |
none |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Lytton Strachey asked Virginia Woolf in 1912 'is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians?' Strachey's own Eminent Victorians (1918) is the starting-point for this unit's inquiry into how we learned to stop worrying and love the Victorians. The unit studies major works engaged with the Victorian cultural inheritance, from forms including life-writing, historical fiction, literary history and criticism, plays, costume drama and adaptation. In charting the shift from Modernist anti-Victorianism to the neo-Victorian novel's contemporary popularity, we consider the purposeful uses of parody and satire, as well as the dangers of pastiche and nostalgia in the twentieth-century preoccupation with the nineteenth century's brightest achievements and darkest secrets. Engaging with contexts such as the rise of Victorian studies and the conservative politics of 'Victorian values', this unit reflects on the historical and subjective forces which shape the reception of the Victorians and their re-imagining in distinctive modern works.
