Undergraduate Course: Victorian Transatlanticism (ENLI10376)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will look at Transatlantic literary exchanges between American and Britain from the early Nineteenth century to the early Twentieth century. Considering works across all major genres, attention will be paid to the ways in which North American & British writers responded to and represented each other's social, political and artistic cultures, and to the variety of literary modes they deployed to do this. The course will concern itself with questions of cultural authority, relationships with the past, cosmopolitanism, slavery and its abolition, gender politics, the advent of detective fiction, and responses to the natural world, among other things. |
| Course description |
This course will look at Transatlantic literary exchanges between American and Britain from the early Nineteenth century to the early Twentieth century. Considering works across all major genres, attention will be paid to the ways in which North American & British writers responded to and represented each other's social, political and artistic cultures, and to the variety of literary modes they deployed to do this. The course will concern itself with questions of cultural authority, relationships with the past, cosmopolitanism, slavery and its abolition, gender politics, the advent of detective fiction, and responses to the natural world, among other things.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
60 %,
Coursework
30 %,
Practical Exam
10 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework Essay - 30%; Class participation assessment - 10%; Exam (2 hours) - 60% |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of some key north American, British and Irish texts across a range of major genres
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of these texts in their national and transatlantic contexts
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of ways in which nation-specific conceptions of literature might be challenged
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the ability to reflect constructively on the development of their own learning and research practice
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the ability to work with interdisciplinary materials
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Reading List
Compulsory Primary Texts:
Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Oxford: OUP 2009
Dickens, Charles. American Notes: for General Circulation. Harmondsworth: Penguin 2000
Tennyson, Alfred. The Major Works. Oxford: OUP 2009
H. W. Longfellow, H.W. Selected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1988
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Yale: Yale University Press 2014
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point'. Online
Carlyle, Thomas. 'Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question' (online)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. Oxford: OUP 2008
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Oxford: OUP 2008
Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Oxford: OUP 2008
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Oxford: OUP 2008
Shaw, George Bernard. Three Plays for Puritans. Harmondsworth: Penguin 2006
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. Oxford: OUP 2008
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Oxford: OUP 2008)
Hudson, W.H. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. Oxford: OUP 1998
Recommended Reading:
Recommended Secondary Reading
Week 1
o Bell, Michael Davitt. The Development of American Romance: the Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980)
o Eberwein, Jane D., 'Transatlantic Contrasts in Irving's Sketch Book', College Literature 15.2 (1988): 153-170
o Mulvey, Christopher, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
o Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988)
Week2
o Claybaugh, Amanda, 'Toward a new transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States', Victorian Studies 48.3 (2006): 439-60
o John, Juliet, ' 'A Body Without a Head': The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens's American Notes', Journal of Victorian Culture 12.2 (2007): 173-202
o McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: U Penn Press, 2007)
Week 3
o Meredith McGill, ed. The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008)
o Matthew Bevis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford, OUP, 2013)
o Beverly Taylor and Elizabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1800 (Cambridge: 1983)
o Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (London: Ashgate, 2007)
o Christoph Irmscher and Robert Arbour, eds., Reconsidering Longfellow (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014)
o Christoph Irmscher, Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Bsotn, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009)
o Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (London: Greenwood Press, 1963)
o Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia: A Study of the Poet's Relationship with the Northern Languages and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947)
Week 4
o Douglass, Frederick, Selected |Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Chicago university Press, 1999)
o Rice, Alan, and Crawford, Martin eds. Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1999)
o Sweeney, Fionnghuala Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007)
o Shepperson, George, 'Frederick Douglass and Scotland', The Journal of Negro History 38.3 (1953): 307-321
o Brophy, Sarah, 'Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' and the Politics of Interpretation', Victorian Poetry 36.3 (1998) 273-288
Week 5
o Bell, Millicent 'The Marble Faun and the Waste of History', Southern Review 35.2 (1999): 354-70
o Levine, Robert S. ' 'Antebellum Rome' in The Marble Faun', American Literary History 2 (1990): 19-38
o Millington, Richard H. (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge: CUP, 2006)
o Swann, Charles. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991)
Week 6
o Fermanis, Porscha, 'Culture, Counter-Culture and the Subversion of the Comic in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', The Mark Twain Annual 5 (2007): 93-107
o Kordecki, Lesley C., 'Twain's Critique of Mallory's Romance: Forma Tractandi and A Connecticut Yankee', Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.3 (1986): 329-348
o Lerer, Seth 'Hello Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's 'Connecticut Yankee'', American Literary Realism 1870-1910 26.1 (1993): 26-39
o Robinson, Forrest G (ed.).,The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)
Week 7
o Byer, Robert H., 'Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe'as 'The Man of the Crowd', in Ideology and Classic AmericanLiiterature, Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen eds., (Cambridge: CUP, 1986)
o Benjamin, Walter, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999)
o Hayes, Kenneth J., The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge: CUP. 2002)
o Irwin, John T., The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1994)
o Kennedy, J. Gerald 'The Limits of Reason: Poe's Deluded Detectives', American Literature, 47. 2 (1975): 184-196
o Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (eds.), Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
o Knight, Stephen, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
o Orel, Harold (ed), Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: GK Hall, 1992)
Week 8
o Friedman, David, Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity (New York: Norton, 2014)
o Morris Jr., Roy, Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2013)
o Eltis, Sos, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Glos: Claendon Press, 1996)
o Powell, Kerry, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: CUP, 1990)
o Innes, Christopher, The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)
o Crompton, Louis, Shaw the Dramatist: A Study of the Intellectual Background of the Major Plays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971)
o Meisel, Martin, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton university Press, 1963)
Week 9
o Bell, Millicent Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1991)
o Held, Joshua: "Conscience and Consciousness in The Ambassadors: Epistemology, Focalization, and Narrative Ethics" Henry James Review 34.1 (2013): 33-46
o Wilson, Sarah: "Americanness Becomes Modernism in James's The Ambassadors" Studies in the Novel 36.4 (2004): 509-32
Week 10
o Miller, David, W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise (London: Palgrave 1990)
o Ronner, Amy, W. H. Hudson: The Man, The Novelist, The Naturalist (New York: AMS Press, 1986)
o Jason Wilson, W. H. Hudson: The Colonial's Revenge (London: University of London, 1981)
o John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (London: Macmillan Reprints, 1986)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Victorian,nineteenth-century,American,transatlantic,genre,politics,culture |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Keith Hughes
Tel: (0131 6)50 3048
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms June Haigh
Tel: (0131 6)50 3620
Email: |
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