Undergraduate Course: Great Victorian Novel (ENLI10422)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| 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 is designed to offer an introduction to the novel during a key period of its development. While students have encountered some of the chosen novelists during the earlier years of their degree, this final year Core Course will permit a more intensive engagement with their work and with the novel as a literary form. The choice of texts will encourage seminar discussion on major topics of critical enquiry in relation to the Victorian novel: these will include, but are not limited to, the continuing influence of the gothic on the novel, sensation fiction, the place of women in the novel, the Condition of England novel, the provincial and rural novel, the place of empire in the novel, and the influence of new scientific and intellectual ideas on the novel. The ¿Great Victorian Novel¿ course provides students with an exciting opportunity to read and analyse some of the most invigorating and important works of English literature. |
| Course description |
Like drama in the early modern period, and poetry in the Romantic era, the novel is the dominant form of writing in the Victorian age. Just as those earlier periods produced important, influential, and lasting works of drama and verse, so the Victorian era brought about similar developments in relation to the novel. While the novel in its modern form had existed in English for over one hundred years before Dickens published his earliest work, he and his fellow Victorians vastly extended the potential and the popularity of this literary mode. This course is designed to enable students to understand why and how the novel occupied such a central role in literary culture at this time. By reading and analysing the work of such major Victorian writers such as Dickens, the Brontës, and George Eliot, students will have the opportunity to understand how the novel became, and continues to be, the dominant form of writing in the English language.
The choice of course texts is designed to inspire discussion of a wide variety of topics relevant to the Victorian period and beyond. These will include, but are not limited to, the continuing influence of the gothic on the novel, sensation fiction, the place of women in the novel, the Condition of England novel, the provincial and rural novel, the place of empire in the novel, and the influence of new scientific and intellectual ideas on the novel. The core texts on this course allow a balanced discussion of these key topics, and will ensure that debates begun in individual seminars will then develop over the course as a whole. Students will therefore be permitted to follow individual topic threads which they may take forward into their written work for this course and beyond. This course will also include, where appropriate, critical and theoretical reading on the Victorian novel. The critical material on the course will include a range of important historical criticism by writers, alongside more recent analytical work.
The course is assessed by two pieces of written work: one essay to be completed during the semester and one to be written during the exam period. Preparation for seminars will involve reading core texts and secondary critical material. In addition, students will complete autonomous learning group tasks each week. Seminars themselves will involve individual as well as group discussion, the latter focused upon responses to ALG work.
The Victorian novel was written to entertain and inform a vast potential audience and this course will permit students to understand how these twin imperatives were realised.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2022/23, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 24 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Additional Information (Learning and Teaching) |
plus 1 hour Autonomous Learning Group per week, at time to be arranged.
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
100% Coursework
40% 2500-word mid-semester Coursework Essay
60% 3000-word Final Essay |
| Feedback |
Written feedback will be provided on each assignment, and additional verbal feedback will be available from the course organiser if requested by the student. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- carry out independent readings of Victorian novels and their criticism.
- reflect on the historical contexts of, and recent critical debates about, the Victorian novel.
- interpret and analyse the formal and aesthetic dimensions of the Victorian novel.
- collaborate effectively with peers to complete group work tasks.
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Reading List
Essential:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, (1851)
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Knowledge and understanding: students will have had the opportunity to demonstrate their detailed knowledge of the fields of the novel as a literary form, and of Victorian literature more generally. The students taking this course will be able to demonstrate their understanding of how a range of the principal concepts of literary analysis may be applied to the course material.
Applied Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: in their work for class discussion and formal assessment tasks, students will have been able to practice the application of these concepts in their construction of arguments about the course material.
Generic Cognitive Skills: through group work and completing assessed essays, students will have practiced identifying, designing, conceptualising and analysing complex problems and issues germane to the discipline.
Communication: through participating in these tasks students will also have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas and information about specialised topics in the discipline to an informed audience of their peers and subject specialists.
Autonomy and Working with Others: students will also have shown the capacity to work autonomously and in small groups on designated tasks, develop new thinking with their peers, and take responsibility for the reporting, analysis and defence of these ideas to a larger group. |
| Additional Class Delivery Information |
one 2 hour Seminar per week;
plus one 1 hour Autonomous Learning Group per week (at time to be arranged) |
| Keywords | Victorian Novel,Gothic novel,Sensation novel,Condition of England novel,Empire. |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Jonathan Wild
Tel: (0131 6)51 3191
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: |
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