Undergraduate Course: Modern Love: Victorian Poetry and Prose. (ENLI10370)
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 | Modern ideas of 'Victorian values' depend upon clichés and distortions of Victorian ideas of love: reverence for the nuclear family combined with prudishness and prurience; marriage plots, covered table-legs and scandal sheets publishing the dirty secrets of the divorce courts. This course offers students the opportunity to discover the complex and diverse forms of Victorian interpersonal relationship, through close examination of a range of poetry, prose and drama. |
| Course description |
Modern ideas of 'Victorian values' depend upon clichés and distortions of Victorian ideas of love: reverence for the nuclear family combined with prudishness and prurience; marriage plots, covered table-legs and scandal sheets publishing the dirty secrets of the divorce courts. This course offers students the opportunity to discover the complex and diverse forms of Victorian interpersonal relationship, through close examination of a range of poetry, prose and drama. Prudes, perverts, and perfect families will be encountered, but so too will bigamists, emancipated women, loving and unloving patrons, unhappy families, passionate friendships, failed marriages, and families of choice. The construction and subversion of gender norms, and the impact of factors such as class, education, locale, and religion on the way love is understood as normative or perverse, will be major themes of the course.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 45 |
| 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 (2500 words) - 30%; Class participation assessment - 10%; Exam (2 hours) - 60% |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours & Minutes |
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| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | | 2:00 | |
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: essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate an ability to critically analyse Victorian poetry, prose and drama
- By the end of the course a student will be able to show knowledge of the historical contexts of Victorian representations of interpersonal relationships
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of recent critical debates regarding Victorian representations of interpersonal relationships
- By the end of the course a student will be able to demonstrate the ability to reflect critically on a variety of critical and methodological approaches to Victorian poetry, prose and drama
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Reading List
Poetry, plays and some supplementary readings for the course will be provided via LEARN.
Students are expected to use the following critical editions. Other editions do not contain the same critical material or use different copy texts:
Jane Eyre (Norton)
Aurora Leigh (Norton)
The Mill on the Floss (Norton)
Great Expectations (Norton)
Modern Love (Yale University Press edition: access via LEARN or DiscoverEd)
New Grub Street (Oxford)
Week 1 Love Poetry I:
1. Robert Browning, ¿The Statue and the Bust¿. VIA LEARN
2. Matthew Arnold, ¿Isolation. To Marguerite¿ and ¿To Marguerite ¿ Continued¿. VIA LEARN
3. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ¿Rizpah¿ VIA LEARN
4. Christina Rossetti, ¿Passing Away, Saith the World¿. VIA LEARN.
Week 2 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Supplementary reading: excerpts from Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in the Norton edition of Jane Eyre pp. 457-65.
Week 3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1857)
Supplementary reading: Elizabeth Barrett Browning on ¿Thomas Carlyle and the Prophet-Poet¿, excerpted in the Norton edition of Aurora Leigh pp. 391-99.
Week 4 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Supplementary reading: contemporary reviews excerpted in the Norton edition of The Mill on the Floss by Craik, James, Swinburne, Ruskin, pp. 458-68.
Week 5 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61)
Supplementary reading: Christopher Ricks, ¿Great Expectations¿ in the Norton edition of the novel, pp. 668-674.
Week 6 George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)
Supplementary reading: Cynthia Grant Tucker, ¿Meredith¿s Broken Laurel¿, Victorian Poetry, 1972 pp. 351-65 (link to article on LEARN Talis Aspire).
Week 7 Love Poetry II:
1. William Morris, ¿The Defence of Guenevere¿. VIA LEARN
2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ¿Nuptial Sleep¿. VIA LEARN
3. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ¿Dolores (Our Lady of Pain)¿, Representative Poetry Online, link via LEARN
4. Michael Field, ¿Long Ago, LIV¿. VIA LEARN
Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 9 George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
Supplementary reading: Robert S. Selig, ¿¿The Valley of the Shadow of the Books¿: Alienation in Gissing¿s New Grub Street¿, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1970 pp. 188-98 (link to article via LEARN Talis Aspire).
Week 10 Arthur Wing Pinero, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895); Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895) (via LEARN)
Recommended Further Reading:
Anderson, Amanda, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
Armstrong, Isobel, Robert Browning (London: Bell, 1974)
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993)
Blair, Kirstie, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford,: Clarendon, 2006)
Bristow, Joseph, Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005)
Collini, Stefan, Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
David, Deirdre, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Furneaux, Holly, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Glen, Heather, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Greiner, Rae, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2012)
Ledger, Sally, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester University Press, 1997)
Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Levine, George, The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford University Press,1994)
Pearsall, Cornelia, Tennyson¿s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Shaw, Harry, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Tucker, Herbert, A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Victorian literature,fiction,poetry,drama,relationships,class,gender,education,place,religi |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Katherine Inglis
Tel: (0131 6)50 3617
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Anne Mason
Tel: (0131 6)50 3618
Email: |
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