Courses

Course place and status within the program

Credits: English Philology – 5; Hybrid – 3;

It introduces specific terminology and emphasizes the possibility of reviewing the contents of particular literary items by comparative and interdisciplinary analysis whilst also stimulating the prowess to research literary contents in a broader socio-historical context. The expectations are that this course might aid the students improve their overall knowledge of a chosen period of the development of English literature, whilst also coaching their analytic skill and furthering their research abilities with the prospects of future, more focused thematic studies in the subject area of literature, philosophy and in relevant interdisciplinary projects.

NB! A synopsis of a relieved syllabus, reading list and course requirements are available for hybrid philologies upon request.

For the purpose of the successful completion of the course all students are required to:· Be present at, and take active part in, discussions during seminar classes
· Cover the whole of the reading list of prose fiction and poetic works of the period
· Study valuable relevant criticism and make their own contribution in discussions and in working on individual projects
· Maintain a good level of written and spoken English in order to put themselves across to their peers and to the course convenor
· Master the set of critical terms and philosophical concepts applicable to the literary period in hand
· Resist BY ALL MEANS (!!!) any temptations/urge to cheat: i.e. to copy during a test, or to plagiarise from available critical sources (hard copy, or THE INTERNET), or from one another! An attempt to cheat in any way leads to disqualification from the right to sit for the exam and may well lead to further departmental complications!!!
· Come for the class with THEIR OWN GROUP and ON TIME
· Facilitate the atmosphere of civilized discussion and ethics in tolerating one another’s viewpoint and manner of presentation

It would indeed be common courtesy of a student to inform the course convenor of an inability to attend (a) seminar(s) in advance: that would guarantee better synchronization with the pace of work – planned and actual.

DO NOT HESITATE TO CONTACT ME IN MY SURGERY HOURS: Wednesday, 8.45-10.15, Rectorate, Room 240
NB! EXAMINATION FORMAT:

Type                                                                                                                             Worth

Participation in discussions during seminars                                                20 %
Written Exam (theory & actual analysis of specific literary excerpts)   40 %
Individual Assignments                                                                                          15 %
Tests                                                                                                                              25 %

Weekly organization of topics & reading assignments:

English Literature of the Victorian Age

ACADEMIC YEAR 2011/2012

COURSE CONVENOR: Dr Yana Rowland

/syllabus/

Victorianism – preliminary terminological and cultural notes. Industrialism and Utilitarianism.

Early Victorianism – Oracular Prose and the Condition-of-England question novel: Carlyle, Disraeli & Mrs. Gaskell.

The Realist Novel – the dialogue with society. Charles Dickens: comedy & melodrama; the quest for selfhood & for truth. The Victorian Bildungsroman.

William Makepeace Thackeray: omniscient narrative and “the manager of the performance”. Irony & self-criticism.

The ‘tripartite club’: the Brontë Sisters. The poetical background. Gothicism and (female) life-writing. The ‘metaphysical’ novel.

Charles Darwin & the Mid-Victorian Novel: gradualism, positivism, sensationalism & the crisis of faith. Kingsley, Collins, Bulwer-Lytton, Trollope.

‘Currents and floods’: George Eliot and the development of the psychological novel. Intrusive narrative, introspection & the course of Nature. Character & Socio-Cultural Milieu.

Pessimism cum Fantasy: Meredith, Butler, Gissing, Carroll, Lear.

Naturalism & Determinism. A Universe of sordid jest: Thomas Hardy. The Prophet and the Alien.

Victorian Poetry: Victorian Romantics: Tennyson & Browning. Myth, tradition & Otherness. The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood: Rossetti (Dante G. & Christina), Morris, Swinburne & visual art.

Fin de siècle. Aestheticism and Decadence: theorists & ‘executioners’. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde & the inversions of the Self…

Other spaces, other lore… Transgressing Britishness: Stevenson & Kipling.

Theatre & Drama in the Victorian Age.

English Literature of the Victorian Age

Reading list

ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

NB! The reading list is a condition sine qua non and the absolute minimum for all students aiming at a successful completion of this course!

6. Anne Brontë (1820-1849): The Tenant of Wildfell Hall;

7. George Eliot /Mary Ann Evans/ (1819-1880): The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner;

8. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): Mariana; The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; Break, Break, Break; Ulysses; In Memoriam (exc.); Crossing the Bar;

9. Robert Browning (1812-1889): Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister; The Pied Piper of Hamelin; My Last Duchess; Porphyria’s Lover; ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’; Fra Lippo Lippi; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church;

10. Eminent Victorian Female Poets: Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861): Aurora Leigh (exc.); Christina Rossetti (1830-1894): Goblin Market (exc.);

11. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): The Blessed Damozel; The House of Life (exc.);

12. William Morris (1834-1896): The Defence of Guenevere;

13. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): The Garden of Proserpine;

14. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): The Forsaken Merman; Dover Beach;

15. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): Tess of the D’Urbervilles; + 1 more novel of the student’s own choice (either Far From the Madding Crowd, or The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Jude the Obscure);

16. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): The Picture of Dorian Gray;

17. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1994): The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde;

English Literature of the Victorian Age

Semestral seminar weekly planning

ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

Week 1 – Introduction to the Victorian Age. The condition-of-England novel. A Case Study: Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South, (1855).
Week 2 – Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861). Humour and Melodrama. The formation of character – dialogue and 1^st-person narrative. Portrayal & symbolism. Bildüngsroman. The theme of orphanhood in a broader authorial context.
Week 3 – Great Expectations. Close reading and stylistic analysis of select excerpts.
Week 4 – William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair. A Novel without a Hero (1848). The omniscient narrator. Documenting history & subverting morality. Heroes and heroic worship. Female personae and male progenitors. Time and Space – epic or drawing-room? History and individual fate. Close reading of select excerpts.
Week 5 – Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1847). Autobiography and gender issues (the governess as a social category). The theme of orphanhood. Education and individuation. Biological deprivation and social privation. Evangelicalism: the motif of pardon and the notion of Heaven/Hell.
Week 6 – Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights (1847). Gothicism, pantheism, subjective idealism. Structural peculiarities: narrators, credibility and the progress of Time. Remembrance, spiritual fulfillment and carnal presence. Personal freedom and social convention. Mysticism, Stoicism and the motif of revenge. Onomastic and toponymic particulars in approaching the Brontë Sisters.
Week 7 – Wuthering Heights. Close reading and stylistic analysis of select excerpts.
Week 8 – George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss (1860). The psychological streak. Conscience and Consciousness. Fraternal fidelity and ideological bondage. Self-realization & social duty. Theology & Teleology.
Week 9 – The Mill on the Floss. Close reading and stylistic analysis of select excerpts.
Week 10 – Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891). The female character: personal ethics & dominant Christian doctrines. The motifs of sin and of damnation. Outcast and outlaw. The motif of forgiveness. Regionalism, landscape painting and elegiac nuances.
Week 11 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Close reading and stylistic analysis of select excerpts.
Week 12 – Masterpieces of Victorian Poetry (1). Lord Alfred Tennyson. Discussion of select poetic works. The motif of alienation and the remedial capacity of poetry and of the fine arts.
Week 13 – Masterpieces of Victorian Poetry (2). Robert Browning. Discussion of select poetic works. The victimized female individual & the male artist in cultural history.
Week 14 – Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Aestheticism, decadence and the issue of conscience. Artistic liberty and aesthetic responsibility. The Preface to the novel. Close reading and stylistic analysis of select excerpts.
Week 15 – Progress Test (admission to exam!).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(Critical reference)

The list of works suggested in this bibliography is prescriptive. It offers a solid and varied background to the course entitled ‘English Literature of the Victorian Period.’ Students are encouraged to broaden the list by adding new sources of critical analysis in accordance with their personal interpretative inclinations and thus foster their own ideas and perceptions about works and problems subject to discussion. Please note that the titles in Bold Type are crucial in approaching the course, whereas the titles underlined are among the ones available in the free-access section of reading room I at Ivan Vazov Public Library in Plovdiv.

NB! For the empirics: ANY anthology (in particularized volumes) of English Literature (e.g. Norton, Oxford etc.)!
Alcorn, John M., The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (Columbia University Press, 1977)
Allen, Walter, The English Novel. A Short Critical History (Penguin Books, 1991)
Allott, Miriam, (ed.) Novelists on the Novel (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry. Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York, Routledge, 1993)
Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel (OUP, 1987)
Auerbach, Nina, The Woman and the Demon. The Life a Victorian Myth (Harvard University Press, 1982)
Baker, William & Womack, Kenneth, A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Westport Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press, 2002)
Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)
Bergonzi, Bernard, The Turn of a Century. Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature (Macmillan, 1973)
Blamires, Harry, A Short History of English Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
Borklund, Elmer. Contemporary Literary Critics (London: St James Press & NY: St Martin’s Press, 1977)
(eds.) Bown, Nicola &Burdett, Carolyn & Thurschwell, Pamela, The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Boyer, John Wilson & Brooks, John Lee, The Victorian Age. Prose, Poetry and Drama (New jersey, Prentice – Hall, INC., 1954)
Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern British Novel (Penguin Books, 1994)
Bratton, J. S., The Victorian Popular Ballad (Macmillan, 1975)
Bristow, Joseph, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (CUP, 2000)
Brett, R. L., Faith and Doubt. Religion and Secularisation in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin (Mercer University Press, 1997)
Bronfen, Elizabeth, Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992)
Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn. Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968)
Byron, Glennis, Dramatic Monologue (Routledge, 2003)
Campbell, Matthew, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Caroll, David, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations, A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Carter, Ronald & McRae, John, The Penguin Guide to Literature in English in Britain and Ireland (Penguin English, 2001)
Cazamian, Louis, A History of English Literature. Modern Times (1660-1932), translated from French by W. D. MacInnes & the author (New York: Macmillan, 1945)
Chapple, J. A. V., Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Macmillan, 1986)
Colville, Derek, Victorian Poetry and the Romantic Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970)
Cox, Michael, The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature (OUP, 2004)
(eds.) Cronin, R., Chapman, A., Harrison., A., A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell Publishing, 2007)
Davis, Philip, The Victorians – vol. 8 of the Oxford English Literary History (OUP, 2004)
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, Victorian Afterlives. The Shaping of Influence in 19^th-century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Duncan, Ian, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel. The Gothic, Scott & Dickens (CUP, 2005)
Eagleton, Terry, The English Novel. An Introduction (Blackwell Publishing, 2008, < 2005)
Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1984)
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, The English Novel in History: 1840-1895 (Routledge, 1997)
Evans, Ifor, English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen & CO LTD, 1966)
Fowler, Alistair, A History of English Literature (Basil Blackwell, 1989)
Friedman, Alan, The Turn of the Novel. The Transition to Modern Fiction (OUP, 1970)
Gillie, Christopher, Character in English Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970)
Griffiths, Eric, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Hillis Miller, J., Charles Dickens. The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958)
Hillis Miller, J., Victorian Subjects (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)
Holman, Hugh C. & Harmon, W., A Handbook to Literature (Macmillan, 1986)
Hobsbaum, Philip, A Reader’s guide to Charles Dickens (London: Thames &Hudson, 1972)
Holloway, John, The Victorian Sage. Studies in Argument New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1965)
Horsman, Alan, The Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Hughes, Linda K., The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (CUP, 2010)
Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction (OUP, 1968)
Kettle, Arnold, An Introduction to the English Novel (Hutchinson University Library, 1957)
Kinkaid, James R., Annoying the Victorians (New York and London: Routledge, 1995)
Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition. George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (Penguin Books, 1983)
Levine, George, How to Read the Victorian Novel (Blackwell Publishing, 2008)
Leighton, Angela, Victorian Women Poets. Writing Against the Heart (Harvester Wheathsheaf, 1992)
Mermin, Dorothy & Tucker, Herbert F., Victorian Literature: 1830-1900 (Harcourt College Publishers, 2004)
Morse, David, High Victorian Culture (Macmillan, 1993)
O’Gorman, Francis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (CUP, 2010)
O’Neill, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Poetry (CUP, 2010)
Ormond, Leonée, Alfred Tennyson. A Literary Life (Macmillan, 1993)
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry. From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977)
Pollard, Arthur, (ed.) The Victorians – Vol. 6 of the Penguin History of Literature (Penguin Books, 1993)
Quennell, Peter (& Johnson, Hamish), A History of English Literature (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1973)
Rauch, Alan, Useful Knowledge. The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001)
Raymond, Claire, The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath (Ashgate, 2006)
Richards, Bernard, English Poetry of the Victorian Period (London and New York: Longman, 1992)
Rowland, Yana, The Treatment of the Themes of Mortality in the Poetry of the Brontë Sisters (Plovdiv: Plovdiv University Press, 2006)
Sampson, George, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993)
Schad, John, Queer Fish. Christian Unreason From Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004)
Schad, John, Victorians in Theory. From Derrida to Browning (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1999)
Schmidt, Michael, Lives of the Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
Shattock, Joanne (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 1830 – 1914 (CUP, 2010)
Shattock, Joanne, (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain: 1800-1900, (CUP, 2001)
Shaw, W. David, Victorians and Mystery (Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1990)
Sicher, Efraim. Rereading the City. Rereading Dickens. Representation, the Novel and Urban Realism (New York: AKS Press, Inc., 2003)
Slinn, E. Warwick, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique. The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2003)
Sternlieb, Lisa, The Female Narrator in the British Novel (Palgrave, 2002)
Stewart, J. I. M., Writers of the Early Twentieth Century. Hardy to Lawrence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Stone, Donald D., Communications with the Future. Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2000)
Thornley, G. C. & Roberts, Gwyneth, An Outline of English Literature (Longman, 1996)
Trilling, Lionel & Bloom, Harold, Victorian Prose and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Trotter, David, The English Novel in History: 1895-1920 (Routledge, 1993)
Tucker, Herbert F., (ed.) A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture (Blackwell Publishing, 2004)
Turner, Paul, Victorian Poetry, Drama and Miscellaneous Prose: 1832 – 1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Van Ghent, Dorothy, The English Novel. Form and Function (New York: Rineheart & Company, INC., 1953)
Ward, A. C., English Literature. Chaucer to Bernard Shaw (Longmans, Green and CO, 1958)
Wheeler, Michael, Heaven, Hell and the Victorians (CUP, 1994)
Willey, Basil, Nineteenth Century Studies. Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961)
Wilt, Judith, Ghosts of the Gothic. Austen, Eliot and Lawrence (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings. Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Palgrave, 2002)

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Course place and status within the program

Competence expectations

Aims and objectives of the course:

A secondary aim of this course is to improve the students’ overall knowledge of a chosen period of the development of English poetry, whilst coaching their analytic skill and furthering their research abilities with the prospects of future, more focused thematic studies in the subject area of literature, philosophy and in relevant interdisciplinary projects.

Weekly organization of topics & reading assignments:

Section I – lectures (8 consecutive classes) on relevant philosophy;

Section II – textual analysis (6 consecutive classes) on:

a/ Thomas Gray: the cognitive resources of the nether world. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).

b/ William Wordsworth: the poet befuddled: multitudinous selfhood and paradoxical discontinuities in We Are Seven.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: seafaring & Penitence: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798/1817).

Emily Brontë: the problem of the Dead/Missing Other in the context of Gondal (Infanticide, Orphanhood; the Ghost; the sinner). A selection of poems is to be provided.

Alfred Tennyson: the disillusioned individual and the search for an Authorial Other (the problem of FAITH); evolutionism. In Memoriam (1834-1850), Crossing the Bar (1889).

Matthew Arnold: the “incognizable” land and the sea of Life. The ontogenetic relationship between time and space – in anthropological terms. The Forsaken Merman (1849), Human Life (1852), Lines Written by a Death-Bed (1852), Dover Beach (1867); A Wish (1867).

Thomas Hardy: ‘forbidden’ mourning. A selection of poems from: Life’s Little Ironies (1894), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Human Shows (1925).

– written literary essay – 50 % _(requiring implementation of theory in direct textual analysis of a relevant poetic excerpt, in around 600 words; tifme allotted for the final essay: 90 minutes);
– participation in discussions – 25 % (individual presentations of theory read and applied; general group discussions, team projects – oral and written;)
– summary of a select philosophical excerpt