Unit information: Victorian Afterlives in 2014/15

Unit name	Victorian Afterlives
Unit code	ENGLM3035
Credit points	20
Level of study	M/7
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. Lee
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	none
Co-requisites	none
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Lytton Strachey asked Virginia Woolf in 1912 'is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians?' Strachey's own Eminent Victorians (1918) is the starting-point for this unit's inquiry into how we learned to stop worrying and love the Victorians. The unit studies major works engaged with the Victorian cultural inheritance, from forms including life-writing, historical fiction, literary history and criticism, plays, costume drama and adaptation. In charting the shift from Modernist anti-Victorianism to the neo-Victorian novel's contemporary popularity, we consider the purposeful uses of parody and satire, as well as the dangers of pastiche and nostalgia in the twentieth-century preoccupation with the nineteenth century's brightest achievements and darkest secrets. Engaging with contexts such as the rise of Victorian studies and the conservative politics of 'Victorian values', this unit reflects on the historical and subjective forces which shape the reception of the Victorians and their re-imagining in distinctive modern works.

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the unit, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and appreciation of a range of twentieth-century and contemporary texts engaging with the Victorian cultural inheritance
• Have an enhanced sense of the historical and critical relations between Victorian and modern works
• Apply appropriate literary, historical and theoretical contexts to discussion of the literature of Victorian afterlives
• Analyse relevant primary texts to a sophisticated level orally and in writing.

Teaching Information

10 x 2-hour seminar, 1 reading week, 11 Consultation Hours

Assessment Information

One summative essay of 4,000 words and one 1000 word class presentation

Reading and References

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight (1938)

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

Tom Phillips, A Humument (1970-)

A.S. Byatt, Possession (1987)

Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957)

For more detail about the unit, contact the tutor: S.Matthews@bristol.ac.uk