Romanticism and Victorian Society 1815-1900

This course picks up the strands of the semester 1 course on 'Enlightenment and Romanticism' - the romantic subject, the nation, gender and class hierarchies - and takes them forward into the nineteenth century. It traces their ramifications across a wide range of genres, and introduces students to the complexities of the interaction between literary and cultural formations in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The course is divided thematically rather than chronologically into five major sections; the set texts will enable students to consider a range of topics of intellectual and cultural significance, including religion, science, nation and Empire, gender and class. In each of these sections, established literary genres such as the novel, the romance and the elegy (as well as a range of modes from the Gothic to the naturalistic) will be brought into dialogue with other forms, including short stories, reviews, treatises, essays and lectures (to be circulated as supplementary reading). The aim is to assess both the modifications that 'literary' and 'non-literary' texts undergo in response to each other, and the ways they reflect and, in their turn, influence social reality.   Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate