Postgraduate Course: Charles Dickens (ENLI11072)

Course Outline
School	School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures	College	College of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	20	ECTS Credits	10
Summary	This course involves a close and concentrated reading of a selection of Dickens's writing spanning his career. It looks at the ways in which Dickens's understanding of the novel form developed, moving from the energetic sentimentalism of the early work to the much more controlled and sophisticated layering of a book like Great Expectations. The course is designed to explore questions of narratology, and will engage with both recent and influential accounts of Dickens's formal experimentation (J. Hillis Miller, D. A. Miller, Peter Brooks, for example). We'll discuss the extent to which Dickens has become the definitive Victorian novelist, and consider the ways in which his writing might also point towards later, post-Victorian developments in the novel. The course also examines aspects of the material and social culture in and about which Dickens writes, including the impact of serial publication on ideas of authorship, the pervasiveness of ideologies of domesticity in his work, his response to the United States, and the tension in his writing between social radicalism and forms of political conservatism. Students will be able to concentrate intensively on an author whose centrality to Victorian culture and to histories of the novel as a mode of textual practice allows for a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches. *This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited
Course description	This course involves a close and concentrated reading of a selection of Dickens's writing spanning his career. It looks at the ways in which Dickens's understanding of the novel form developed, moving from the energetic sentimentalism of the early work to the much more controlled and sophisticated layering of a book like Great Expectations. The course is designed to explore questions of narratology, and will engage with both recent and influential accounts of Dickens's formal experimentation (J. Hillis Miller, D. A. Miller, Peter Brooks, for example). We'll discuss the extent to which Dickens has become the definitive Victorian novelist, and consider the ways in which his writing might also point towards later, post-Victorian developments in the novel. The course also examines aspects of the material and social culture in and about which Dickens writes, including the impact of serial publication on ideas of authorship, the pervasiveness of ideologies of domesticity in his work, his response to the United States, and the tension in his writing between social radicalism and forms of political conservatism. Students will be able to concentrate intensively on an author whose centrality to Victorian culture and to histories of the novel as a mode of textual practice allows for a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches. *This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites		Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course students will be able to: - demonstrate a good knowledge of the writing career of Charles Dickens; - show an awareness of issues of narrative style and narrative theory as they pertain to his work; - demonstrate a familiarity with a variety of the historical and contextual contexts that inform Dickens's prose; - assess the impact of Dickens's writing in his own cultural moment and in a post-Victorian age