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The Victorian age saw the breakthrough of high modernity. As the technologically most advanced nation, the United Kingdom (which at the time included 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 and living conditions were often catastrophic, and doubts about 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: industrialization and urbanization, the condition-of-England question, Chartism, political reforms, the crisis of faith, the Hungry Forties and the Great Famine in Ireland, the Great Exhibition of 1851, the crisis of faith and the theory of evolution, the novel as the most successful genre of the age, nonsense-literature, melodrama, 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 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, Robert Louis Stevenson, Augusta Webster, Oscar Wilde, 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 (8 February 2022).
Text (recommended):
Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Tenth Edition. Package 2: Volumes D, E, F. New York: Norton, 2018. ISBN 978-0-393-60313-2
NB: For this lecture course, you will need volume E.
You will find The Norton Anthology of English Literature useful also in other lectures and seminars. |
