MA in Victorian Literature and Culture QUESTIONING THE VICTORIANS: TEXTS, CONTEXTS AND AFTERLIVES

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1 MA in Victorian Literature and Culture QUESTIONING THE VICTORIANS: TEXTS, CONTEXTS AND AFTERLIVES Convenor: Dr James Williams Office No. D/J/207; Phone: This course surveys some of the major literary and cultural developments in, and the central preoccupations of, Victorian writing, as formulated by contemporaries and by recent critics and theorists. It introduces key thematic areas and problems in the interpretation of nineteenth-century literature across a broad range of genres. Sessions are grouped to enable students to sample theoretical, historical, and aesthetic approaches. Below is an outline of the module so you can see the whole term at a glance, followed by more detailed descriptions of seminars. For each seminar there is core reading which is compulsory preparation, and also a selection of further reading which you are encouraged to sample as widely as possible. To give you an idea of what to expect, unless a tutor indicates, a wellprepared MA student arriving for a seminar will have read all the core reading and at least three or four article-sized items which could be, for example, book chapters by different authors in the further reading. THE TERM AT A GLANCE Week 1: Week 2: Week 3: Week 4: Week 5: Week 6: Week 7: Week 8: Week 9: Week 10: Introductory Meeting (James Williams)* Introducing Postgraduate Victorian Studies: V21 and Beyond (Trev Broughton) Elizabeth Gaskell s North and South (Emma Major) The Invention of Irish Poetry (Matthew Campbell) The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Literary Painters (Elizabeth Prettejohn) READING WEEK Making Sense of Nonsense (James Williams) Marx s Ghostly Matters (John Bowen) Princess Casamassima and Great Expectations (Victoria Coulson) Oscar Wilde: Art, Theatricality, Aestheticism and Comedy in the Fin-de-Siècle (Hugh Haughton) * Please note this meeting is for students taking the Victorian Literature and Culture MA, rathe r than for all students taking Questioning the Victorians. With the exception of Week 1, Seminars meet on Wednesday s at 11am. Please consult online timetables for room information. 1

2 WEEK 2: V21 AND BEYOND Dr Trev Broughton SEMINAR INFORMATION This seminar is designed as an introduction to some of the most recent and/or consequential debates in Victorian literary studies. We start with some big but important questions. What does it mean to read closely? What are the implications of reading in the light of historical context (and what, anyway, does Victorian mean)? Does form matter, and if so, how? Our first session drops us straight into what is perhaps the most recent cluster of developments: the so-called V21 controversy. In 2015 the ten theses of the V21 collective livened up debate among Victorianists, and animated the self-consciousness of individual scholars about their locations, assumptions, methods and aspirations. The members of the V21 collective are in part inspired by the work of Caroline Levine, in her recent book Forms: Wholes, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2015). We will make parts of this text available via the VLE. The ten theses can be found here The Manifesto in turn generated a series of blog posts or think pieces (e.g. ) For the purposes of this week s exercise you ll need to follow the instructions to sign up for the blog (on the right of the initial v21 screen), so that you can read some of the ensuing debates. Spend some time browsing around the various interventions and think pieces. An even more recent offshoot is the V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism in Victorian Studies 59 1 (Autumn 2016): This is made up of several short pieces and you should be able to access them via the University Library Website, E-Resources, P Project Muse strategic presentism : Keep in mind that the Collective bears the imprint of its US provenance, and certainly doesn t represent Victorian Studies everywhere, or even all North American Victorian Studies. In particular it tends to speak to a certain postmodernist/language-dominated configuration of interdisciplinarity: one many British historians (for instance) would not recognize. Martin Hewitt s post (which was initially rejected by V21 amid social media recriminations) is a case in point. Whether you agree with it or not, it would be useful to think about the implications of the return to Form advocated by Caroline Levine, so start with her book even if the subsequent debate is not your cup of tea. And if it isn t, try one of these alternative approaches: a) An intervention with a more historical rather than a formalist slant can be found in Peter Andersson s How Civilized were the Victorians? Journal of Victorian Culture 20.4 : 2

3 with responses and reflections by Andersson, Navickas, Franklin, Huggins, Matthews-Jones, Steinbach, and Betts on JVC online See for instance A fuller version of the various responses can be found in the Roundtable feature of Journal of Victorian Culture 22.1 (Spring 2017): , with an additional piece by Andersson: Journal of Victorian Culture is available via the library catalogue. b) Alternatively, for an historian s perspective on some of this you might look at the (trans-period) Viewpoint section of the recent Past and Present (Feb 2017) on Presentism. Again, this is available via the library catalogue. As preparation for this, our first session of the module, I would ask you to pick out one or more of the suggested tasks below, and come to the class prepared to offer up some ideas, responses, or provocations. These do not have to be complicated or sophisticated: just something that expresses your reaction (however confused, annoyed or whatever ). Remember everyone is in the same boat, and there are no right answers or preferred approaches. Bring along a passage from next week s set text (North and South) and use it to raise questions about the usefulness (or limitations) of thinking about form or history or both. Send a copy of your chosen passage to me to photocopy (see below). Bring a handout in which part of the V21 debate is situated alongside a piece of nineteenth-century text or a piece of secondary criticism -- of your choice. How do they illuminate or challenge each other? Offer a short (no more than 3 minute) presentation on an aspect of the V21 debate, or the How Civilized debate, that particularly irritated, inspired or challenged you. Write your own V@Y21 Manifesto (make it as long or as short as you like) and be prepared to discuss/defend it. Write a short post in the V21 think-piece style and bring copies for us to share. If you want any handouts photocopied, please send them to me at jlb2@york.ac.uk at least 24 hours before the session. WEEK 3: ELIZABET H GASKELL S NORTH AND SOUTH Dr. Emma Major In 1851 the national Census showed that for the first time in British history, more people lived in the city than in the country. The new industrial cities were seen as representing the best and the worst of Britain, and in the first half of the nineteenth century Manchester came under particular attention as the city in which commentators saw both the promise of a new Jerusalem and the horrors of the future. Gaskell s novel asks many of the questions which troubled people of the 3

4 time: How can a country call itself civilised, and Christian, and yet allow such poverty to exist? What should the relationship be between factory -owner and worker? Did the same class distinctions hold true for north and south of England? How obedient should one be, and to which laws? Did the new social order provide new opportunities for women? And what should the role of literature be in this troubled time? Core Reading Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), eds Sally Shuttleworth and Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008) Please get this edition if possible. Further Reading The Introduction to the OUP recommended edition is useful, as is its bibliography. See also: Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the rise of Economics (Cambridge UP, 2003) Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Cornell UP, 1988) Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Penguin, 1968) Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Thames and Hudson, 1976) Alison Chapman, ed., Elizabeth Gaskell (Icon, 1999) W.A. Craik, Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (Methuen, 1975) Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth, eds, Victorian Criticism of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 1985) Essays by Kate Flint, Linda M. Shires, Joseph W. Childers, and Nancy Armstrong, in Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge UP, 2001) *e-book Catherine Gallagher, The industrial reformation of English fiction (1985) Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (Macmillan, 1996) Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The rise and fall of the Victorian city (Phoenix, 2004) Patricia Ingham, Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (Routledge, 1996) Debra N. Mancoff and D.J. Trela, eds, Victorian urban settings: essays on the nineteenth-century city and its contexts (Garland, 1996) Jill L.Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (CUP, 2007) * e- book Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (Virago, 1989) Hilary Schor, Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford UP, 1992) Shelia M. Smith, The Other Nation: The poor in English novels of the 1840s and 1850s (Oxford UP, 1980) Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Manchester UP 2006) Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Faber, 1993) Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin, 1971) N.B. There are useful related appendices in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Jennifer Foster (1848; Broadview Press, 2000) and in Karl Marx and Friedrich 4

5 Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. L.M. Findlay (1848; Broadview Press, 2004). And some related primary reading Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1850) Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849). WEEK 4: INVENT ING IRISH POET RY: MOORE, FERGUSON, MANGAN Prof. Matthew Campbell What was going on in Ireland before Yeats and Joyce? Was it all just gothic novels, famine and emigration, folksongs and music hall? Why do Victorian poetry people not read nineteenth-century Irish poems? Just how can we think about Victoria's Great Britain if we are not aware it had been since the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801 also a United Kingdom? Why do we think about Victorian England but 19th Century Ireland? How did Irish literature emerge from a European nationalism and republicanism that largely left England alone? And which are the good poems that it would be a pleasure to read and understand? These and other questions will be raised in this seminar. Core Reading A short anthology of texts will be circulated in advance via the VLE. Further Reading Some Anthologies Brooke, Stopford & Rolleston, T.W. A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (London: Murray, 1900). Deane, Seamus (gen. ed.). The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991). Morash, Chris (ed.). The Hungry Voice: The Poetry of the Irish Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989). Taylor, Geoffrey (ed.). Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century(London: Routledge, 1951). Zimmermann, George Denis. Songs of Irish Rebellion 2 nd edn. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002). Some History and Criticism Arnold, Matthew. On The Study of Celtic Literature (1867 Campbell, Matthew, Irish Poetry Under the Union (CUP, 2013), and Michael Perraudin (eds), The Voice of the People (ANTHEM, 2012) Deane Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, (London: Faber, 1985). Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Hunt, Una, Sources and Style in Moore s Irish Melodies (Ashgate, 2017) 5

6 Kiberd Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork U.P., 1999) Lloyd, David. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1987). McCormack, W.J. From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork, Cork University Press, 1994) MacDonagh, Thomas. Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916) (Dublin: Relay, 1996). O Malley, Patrick, Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland (OUP, 2017) Ó Tuama, Sean. Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995). Princeton University Library Chronicle (Special Issue on Irish Poetry), 59, 3 (1998). Schirmer, Gregory A. Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Sturgeon, Sinead, (ed.), Essays on James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak (Palgrave, 2014) Vance, Norman. Irish Literature: A Social History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1900). Welch, Robert, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). White, Harry. The Keeper s Recital (Cork: Cork U.P., 1996).. Musical Constructions of Nationalism (Cork: Cork U.P., 2001). WEEK 5: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES: VICTORIAN LITERARY PAINTERS Prof. Elizabeth Prettejohn This seminar will explore the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, their close associates and followers. Why are works of Pre-Raphaelite visual art overwhelmingly popular with museum and gallery audiences, yet treated with condescension or disdain by many art historians and curators? The seminar will address this question in a variety of ways, and will pay particular attention to the frequent charge that Pre-Raphaelite painting is too literary. Core Reading well, actually, Looking Please familiarize yourselves with works by Pre-Raphaelite artists in the collections of Tate, the Ashmolean (Oxford), or Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which can easily be accessed through their websites (listed below). You may make your own choice of which works to study; please choose at least 4-6 works by different artists, for example: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Allston Collins, Arthur Hughes, John Everett Millais, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, John William Waterhouse, Joanna Boyce Wells, Thomas Woolner. Tate: search at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource at See also the gallery installation shots at 6

7 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: search at Another useful resource for finding pictures in public collections is the BBC s Your Paintings website: Further Reading [All the following are in Key Texts] Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate, 2012) Colin Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012) Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000) ElizabethPrettejohn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); also available as e-book James Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1974) Allan Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; 2nd ed., New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001) WEEK 7: MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE Dr James Williams WEEK 6: READING WEEK (NO SEMINAR) In one sense, nonsense writing has always existed, in every culture; in another sense, it is peculiarly a phenomenon of Victorian England, the product of two writers whose names are consequently always linked to each other: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. This seminar seeks to explore the work of these two writers and ask some fundamental questions: What kind of sense might there be in nonsense? Is nonsense always easily differentiated from sense? What are the literary debts and legacies of Victorian nonsense? What is particularly Victorian about nonsense, and what isn t? Is nonsense for children, and why might that matter? Where do the styles of writing of Lear and Carroll overlap, and where do they differ? How might close attention to nonsense help us see other forms and genres of literature more clearly, or in new light? Core Reading Edward Lear, selections from The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. Vivien Noakes (London: Penguin Classics, 2006). Keen nonsensifiers will want to acquire and read the whole thing, but a selection will be made available on the VLE. Lewis Carroll, Alice s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Classics, 1998). Further Reading Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice (London: Harvill Secker, 2015). Hugh Haughton, ed., The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), see especially the Introduction. 7

8 , Edward Lear and The fiddlediddlety of representation, in Matthew Bevis, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985)., Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London: Routledge, 1994). Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: the Life of a Wanderer, revised edn (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004). Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952; reprinted Dalkey Archive Press, 2015). Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore and London: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). James Williams and Matthew Bevis, eds., Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). WEEK 8: MARX S GHOSTLY MATTERS Prof. John Bowen Karl Marx was a contemporary of Dickens and George Eliot and did much of his most important writing in England. His legacies have continued to haunt the study of Victorian literature and culture and this seminar explores some of the key moments of that presence and inheritance. Please begin with The Eighteenth Brumaire, followed by Stallybrass, followed by Derrida. You ll need to have sense of the political and cultural events that Marx is seeking to understand for The Eighteenth Brumaire. Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, (Penguin) and Robert Gildea s Barricades and Borders (Oxford) give succinct summaries of Louis Napoleon s rise to power and what preceded it. Think about how Marx writes as well as his argument: there is a striking metaphorical and figurative exuberance in his writing which both articulates and dislocates a complex sense of how and why social and political representation happen in the forms they do. Is it a very different Marx from what you might expect? Core Reading Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994) exordium and chs 1 and 3. Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoelon Bonaparte, in Surveys from Exile ed. David Fernbach, especially sections 1 and 7. Also available on line at Peter Stallybrass, Marx s coat in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), Further reading Geoff Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2016). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto intro. Gareth Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). 8

9 William Morris, News from Nowhere (many editions available e.g. Oxford World s Classics, 2003). Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: Norton, 2000). WEEK 9: THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA AND GREAT EXPECTATIONS Dr Victoria Coulson My seminar will be on Henry James, The Princess Casamassima and Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Students will need to have read both texts closely and must have hard copies of each. I will contact you once term begins with specific information about how to prepare for the seminar - this will be a list of topics and questions concerning the two novels. I will not set any secondary reading. WEEK 10: OSCAR WILDE: ART, THEATRICALITY, AESTHETICISM AND COMEDY IN T HE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE Prof. Hugh Haughton This seminar will look at Wilde in relation to theatricality, aestheticism and sexuality, setting his hyper-self-conscious farce The Importance of Being Earnest against two critical dialogues from Intentions (1890) and his fictional essay on Shakespeare, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. Wilde was a master of numerous art-forms poetry, theatre, fiction, fairy-tale, novel, review and critical essay among them but he was also a major theorist of art, working in and against the English tradition of Ruskin, Arnold, Morris and Pater, and the French tradition of Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans. The nature of his own art as well as his thinking about art have been subject to scandal and controversy from the first, and we will look at the changing critical reception of Wilde from his own time to ours, as well as at the forms of theatrical questioning and selfquestioning he practised in his plays and prose. Wilde is in many ways a transitional figure between Victorian and Modern, and we will explore how Wilde s writings bring together art and scandal, comedy and sexuality, in a way that continues to challenge our notions of cultural, moral and biographical identity. Core Reading Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (London: New Mermaid, Methuen, 1988). Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, The Critic as Artist in Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001) Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Critic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968) Further Reading On Wilde: Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987). Josephine M. Guy. ed, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume 4 Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man (Oxford: OUP, 2007). Kerry Powell and Peter Raby eds., Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). 9

10 Peter Raby ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp in Against Interpretation (New York: Delta, 1966). Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde and the Queer Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). On The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde s theatre: Peter Raby Wilde s Comedies of Society and Russell Jackson, The Importance of Being Earnest in Peter Raby ed. Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997) Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: CUP, 1990) Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) On Intentions and Wilde s essays: Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997) Lawrence Danson, Wilde s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 1997) James Williams July