VICTORIAN NOVEL THEN AND NOW  

The Victorian period and its fiction conjures up conflicting images of large, richly decorated drawing rooms and narrow lanes of decrepit slums; tightly laced corsets and dens of ill repute; the thrusting grandeur of empire and the oppression and exploitation of 'savages'. Why does an age often associated with sexual repression, gross economic and gender inequalities, child abuse and colonial subjugation continue to have meaning for us today? The Victorian period was one of great achievement in the novel form. In addition to the realist novel, Victorian writers experimented in a range of genres including gothic, sensation and detective fiction. In recent years, contemporary writers have reworked the rich tradition of the Victorian novel, and reimagined Victorian Culture, as a way of engaging our own obsessions with sex, science, memory, and our (post) modern condition. These novels have been coined 'Neo-Victorian'.

In this course we will examine a series of Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels, situating them among a range of debates in both the Victorian period and our own , about gender, sexuality, subjectivity and the meaning and effectis of increasing modernity. We will ask how do imaginative texts both reflect and participate in key cultural debates? How did Victorian novelists experiment with and elaborate the novel form? How have the neo-Victorian novelists reimagined the Victorians, and their fictions? And why does the nineteenth century continue to haunt us today? Texts may include Wilkie Collins, The Woman in white (1860); William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848); Graham Swift, Ever After (1992); Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) and others.

Preliminary Reading: William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

1 x Oral Seminar presentation (10%)

1 x 2,000 word write up of the seminar presentation (30%)

1x 3,500 word essay (60%)

1 x 2 hour seminar per week (26 hours per semester).