Undergraduate Course: The Victorians and the Past (ENLI10334)
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 | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The Victorians rewrote and appropriated the past in order to further their own ideological agendas, and made it a warning or an exemplar for their contemporaries. In this course we will survey several broad areas that loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination via the poetry and fiction of major authors, and through contextual readings from contemporary publications. We will examine literature as part of a complex interdisciplinary network of knowledge creation, and explore how a wide range of writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past, of ancestry, heritage, and modernity. |
| Course description |
Few things can tell us more about a society than its view of history, its sense of the past. Much of what we think of as modern had its origins in the Victorian period, but the Victorians themselves were obsessed with what came before. And for good reason. New disciplines like geology, biology, archaeology, philology, anthropology, and comparative folklore had unearthed a bewildering variety of hitherto unsuspected pasts. New schools, museums, and publishing practices diffused the knowledge to a wider public than ever before. Political, religious, scientific, and literary debates were conducted in terms of competing understandings of history. The Victorians rewrote and appropriated the past in order to further their own ideological agendas, and made it a warning or an exemplar for their contemporaries. In this course we will survey several broad areas that loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination via the poetry and fiction of major authors, and through contextual readings from contemporary publications. We will examine literature as part of a complex interdisciplinary network of knowledge creation, and explore how a wide range of writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past, of ancestry, heritage, and modernity.
|
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | Essential course texts |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
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 competence in core skills in the study of English Literature: independent reading, essay planning and writing, group discussion, oral presentation, and small-group autonomous learning.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to critically analyse a wide variety of Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian forms of writing.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate understanding of how different nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers tried to construct, preserve, or discredit different versions of the past.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to show knowledge of the range of disciplinary contexts out of which the selected texts emerged and with which they engaged.
- By the end of the course a student will be able to put into dialogue 'literary' and 'non-literary' sources and trace continuities across periods and genres.
|
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Anna Vaninskaya
Tel: (0131 6)50 4284
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Anne Mason
Tel: (0131 6)50 3618
Email: |
|
|
University Homepage