Erste Sitzung: 22. Oktober 2018
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
In this seminar, we will read and discuss three Victorian examples of death and mourning – they are historical and fictional and they are narrated in different genres. By comparing the three, we will attempt to find common Victorian attitudes towards death and discuss how phenomena such as imperialism, industrialisation and the 'crisis of faith' influenced Victorian cultures of mourning.
One of the most consequential deaths of the Victorian Age was the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, on 14 December 1861. Victoria chose the role of 'the widow of Windsor' for the rest of her life and forced her subjects to accept that a single death would influence the course of the British Empire. We will trace the impact of this death in letters by Queen Victoria and in comments such as newspaper articles and letters by people outside of Windsor.
Shortly after Albert's death, Victoria tried to find comfort in the pain of someone else: Alfred Tennyson. In his long elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), Tennyson indulges in mourning for his closest friend Arthur Hallam and seeks to understand an age in which religion and the comfort it used to offer were constantly challenged by new scientific discoveries.
Our third example will be Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847. It was published in the Victorian age, but scholars have struggled to read it as a Victorian novel. We will analyse the novel’s depictions of death and suffering in order to see if and how it challenges Victorian cultures of mourning.
Texts:
All students must use the following editions for this seminar (both editions will be available at Bock & Seip on campus before the start of the new term):
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. Norton, 2002. ISBN: 978-0393978896
Tennyson, Alfred. Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Penguin, 2007. ISBN: 978-0140424430
Excerpts of the relevant letters will be provided. |
