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Erste Vorlesung: 10. April 2018
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung 4.3 statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
The Victorian age saw the breakthrough of technological modernity. As the technologically most advanced nation, the United Kingdom (which at the time included the whole of Ireland) proudly called itself "the workshop of the world". The British Empire reached its greatest extension, and the UK was a superpower in the age of ‘anglobalization’. At the same time, urban and rural poverty increased, working conditions were often catastrophic and the loss of established norms and values threatened to dissolve the very fabric of Victorian society. Victorian literature commented on and negotiated with the cultural and political contexts of its time. Some of the topics to be discussed are: the shocks of industrialization and urbanization, the condition-of-England question, Chartism, political reforms, the crisis of faith, the Great Famine in Ireland, the novel as the most successful genre of the age, nonsense-literature, the (re)formulation of love and gender roles, the emergence of the professional woman writer, aestheticism, the ’Nineties, (anti)imperialist literature.
Among the authors whose works are to be discussed are John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Augusta Webster, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.
There will be a final test (45 mins) in the second half of the last lecture (24th of July, 2018).
Text:
Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ninth Edition. Package 2: Volumes D, E, F. New York: Norton, 2012. ISBN 978-0393913019
[In this semester, you will only need Volume E – the other volumes will be of use to you in other lecture courses and for your studies in general.] |
