Unit information: Victorian Afterlives in 2013/14

Unit name	Victorian Afterlives
Unit code	ENGL39014
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. Matthews
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None.
Co-requisites	None.
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

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, 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.

Aims:

• To give students knowledge of representative twentieth-century and contemporary texts engaging with the Victorian cultural inheritance

• To equip students with literary, historical and theoretical contexts appropriate for an understanding of the literature of Victorian afterlives

• To promote sophisticated critical analysis of relevant primary texts in both oral discussion and written work.

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the unit, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and appreciation of a range of twentieth-century and contemporary texts engaging with the Victorian cultural inheritance

• Have an enhanced sense of the historical and critical relations between Victorian and modern works

• Apply appropriate literary, historical and theoretical contexts to discussion of the literature of Victorian afterlives

• Analyse relevant primary texts to a sophisticated level orally and in writing.

Teaching Information

One x 2 hour seminar per week, plus one-to-one discussion in consultation hours where desired.

Assessment Information

Two summative essays: one of up to 2000 words (one third of weighting) and one of up to 4000 words (two thirds of weighting).

Reading and References

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight (1938)

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

Tom Phillips, A Humument (1970-)

A.S. Byatt, Possession (1987)

Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957)

For more detail about the unit, contact the tutor: S.Matthews@bristol.ac.uk