5AAEB024 Victorians and Social Change 1840-1870

Level/semester taught Convenor/teachers Credit Value: Teaching Arrangements: Assessment: second year module, taught semester 1 Josephine McDonagh (convenor), Louise Lee 15 credits I hour lecture and I hour seminar, weekly One 2000 word essay (40%); one two-hour exam (60%)

This course introduces students to the literature of the first half of the Victorian period. We will read a wide range of texts of different genres, and consider some of the important debates about style and form that preoccupied writers of this period. Of particular interest will be the ways literary texts register and respond to social and cultural questions. Topics to be covered in lectures and seminars include: the Condition of England question and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Victorian society; the Woman Question and debates about marriage, womens property, employment and child care; masculinity; Victorian science and the challenges posed by Darwins evolutionary theory to Victorian intellectual life; Victorian religious debates; the culture of print in the period, and the effects of serial culture; the metropolis and urbanisation; Britains relationships with the rest of the world; and the Victorian fascination with sensationalism. Writers to be studied will include: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith, Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Jones, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Bront, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, J S Mill and Matthew Arnold. Provisional list of texts to be studied Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audleys Secret Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Extracts) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities George Eliot, Middlemarch Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton George Meredith, Modern Love J S Mill, On Liberty Alfred Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama Lecture/Seminar Programme Week 1. Chartism and the Peoples Voice [LL] Seminar Reading: Xeroxes of writings by and about Chartists, including extracts from Thomas Carlyles Chartism (1839), Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), and poetry by Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper and W. J. Linton and other Chartist writers. Further Reading Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Routledge, 1993), chapter 7: The Radical in Crisis pp. 191-204 Anne F. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave, 2005) esp. chapter 3, Cooper and Linton: Chartist Prophets and Craftsmen

Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Anthologies of Chartist Writings: Ian Haywood, ed., Chartist Fiction (Ashgate, 1999 and 2001) 2 volumes. [The first volume contains a great novel by Thomas Martin Wheeler called Sunshine and Shadow, the second contains Ernest Jones, Womans Wrongs] Peter Scheckner, ed., An Anthology of Chartist Poetry (Associated University Presses, 1989) For an online edition of the Chartist newspaper Northern Star, see: http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/ Week 2. Mary Barton, Melodrama and Fiction [JM] Seminar Reading: Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) Further Reading Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (Yale University Press, 1976) Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2006), chapter 2: Coziness and Its Vicissitudes: Checked Curtains and Global Cotton Markets in Mary Barton Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 1988), ch. 3. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalised dissent in the English market Place 18001885 (University of Chicago, 1995) Jill Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Week 3. Maud, Madness & The Crimean War [LL] Seminar Reading: Tennyson, Maud (1855) Further Reading Isobel Armstong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, chapter 10, Tennyson in the 1850s: New Experiments in Conservative Poetry and the Type Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Tennyson, Dickens, Joyce (Oxford University Press, 2006) Kirsty Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 2006) Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (Palgrave, 1989) Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War and the British Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Week 4. Regional Voices: The Bronts [JM] Seminar Reading: Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (1847) Further Reading Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bronts 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1988) Heather Glen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Bronts (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Lucasta Miller, The Bront Myth (Vintage, 2002) K D Snell, ed., The Regional Novel in England and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Week 5. The City: A Tale of Two Cities [JM] Seminar Reading: Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1851) Further Reading Dickens Studies Annual, vol, 12 (1983), Special Issue on A Tale of Two Cities

Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (Yale University Press, 2000) Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (University of Chicago Press, 1995) Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Harvard University Press, 1986) Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Macmillan, 1998) Week 6. Heartbreak, Victorian-style: George Meredith, Modern Love [LL] Seminar Reading: Modern Love (1862) Further Reading Isobel Armstrong, Meredith and Others in Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Routledge, 1993) Patricia M. Ball, The Hearts Events: Victorian Poetry of Relationships (1976) LuAnne Holladay, Movement as Metaphor in George Merediths Modern Love, Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies, 5:2(1985), 33-40. Mervyn Jones, The Amazing Victorian: The Life of George Meredith (1999) John Lucas, Meredith as Poet in Ian Fletcher, ed., Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays (1971) Dorothy Mermin, Poetry as Fiction: Merediths Modern Love, ELH, 43 (1976), 100-19 Week 7. Reading Week Week 8. Sensation Fiction: Crime, Serialisation & Modernity: Lady Audleys Secret [LL] Seminar Reading: Lady Audleys Secret (1862) Further Reading Patrick.Brantlinger, "What Is 'Sensational' About the 'Sensation Novel'?" Nineteenth Century Fiction 1982 (37, 1992) 1-28. Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity 1860-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Jenny Bourne Taylor, In The Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Routledge, 1988) LynPykett, The "improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (Routledge 1999) Week 9. Middlemarch: Realism, Evolution & Scientific Observation: [LL] Seminar Reading: George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2) & Extracts from The Origin of Species (1859) Further Reading Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Fiction [1983] (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University of Virginia Press, 2003) George Levine, Darwin and The Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1992) Week 10. The Woman Question 2: Middlemarch [JM] Seminar Reading: George Eliot, Middlemarch Futher Reading Nicola Diane Thompson, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, chapter 12: A Music of Thine Own: Womens Poetry An Expressive Tradition?

Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1998) Week 11. Are We Post-Victorian? Nineteenth-Century Culture Then and Now [LL] Seminar Reading: Extracts from Culture and Anarchy (1869), On Liberty (1859) and Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Ohio University Press, 2007) Further Reading Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale University Press, 2007) Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) Christine L Krueger, Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Ohio University Press, 2002) John Kucich & Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 12. Essay Consultation

Supplementary bibliography Nina Auerbach Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Fiction Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Womans Magazine, 1800-1914 Joseph Bristow, ed., The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth (eds.), Victorian Criticism of the Novel Ingastina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as Early Victorian Novelists Kate Flint (ed.), The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change Kate Flint, The Woman Reader Shirley Foster, Victorian Womens Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual Peter K. Garrett, The Victorian Multiplot Novel Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Climate of English Literature, 1830-90 Elizabeth Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction John O. Jordan and Carol T. Christ (eds.), Victorian Literature and the Visual Imagination Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism Peter Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart John Lucas, The Literature of Change John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion John P. McGowan, Representation and Revelation: Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats D A Miller, The Novel and the Police Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds.), Victorian Identities Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology Alan Sinfield, The Dramatic Monologue David Skilton (ed.), The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel Helen Small, Loves Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Insanity

Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890 Nicola Diane Thompson (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question Ian Watt, The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism Shearer West, (ed.), The Victorians and Race Chris White, Nineteenth-Century Writing on Homosexuality Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction Examination/Assessment for all students except JYA, Penn students staying ONLY for semester one 1 essay of 2,000 words (40%) due mid semester plus a two-hour unseen examination (60%) taken in the examination period Examination/Assessment for JYA, Penn students staying ONLY for semester one Two essays of 2,000 words, worth 40% and 60% respectively; due mid-semester and the first week of semester 2