Expand+ENG20460 From Victorian to Modern Literature, 1830-1914
Academic Year 2022/2023

This module introduces students to literature from the 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. This period of dramatic change, as Britain moved from a pr...

Hide-ENG20460 From Victorian to Modern Literature, 1830-1914
Academic Year 2022/2023

This module introduces students to literature from the 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. This period of dramatic change, as Britain moved from a predominantly rural economy to become an urbanised, industrialised nation will be discussed with reference to key issues such as transforming attitudes about gender and sexuality; changing class and community relations; debates about democracy and the role of Empire; and the growth of new sciences and technologies. We will consider how such writers as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and Virginia Woolf addressed and reflected such issues in their work, across various genres including the novel, drama, the short story, the poem and the essay. We will also consider how the literature of this period relates to the Romanticism that preceded it and we will consider the forces of Modernism that transformed Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics.

Learning Outcomes:
Familiarity with a range of nineteenth-century literary forms

Demonstrate knowledge of major writers of the period and and understanding of how their work both reflects and interrogates key social, political and cultural issues of the time.

Increased understanding of the ways that Victorian literature relates to Romantic and Modern Literature

Ability to write critically about a range of nineteenth and early-twentieth century texts.

Indicative Module Content:
Literary forms and historical context; attitudes to gender and sexuality; changing class and community relations; debates about democracy and the role of Empire; and the growth of new sciences and technologies, periodization.