Aims of the course:
- to read significant novels in the period 1860s-1920s and to understand their place in literary history, particularly the development of realism and modernism
- to develop skills in critical reading and literary analysis
- to become familiar with relevant critical terms, such as 'realism', 'modernism' and 'decadence'
Outcomes:
As a result of the course, within the constraints of the time available, students should be able to:
- show good knowledge of the texts, authors and period studied
- be familiar with contemporary reviews and subsequent critical debates about the texts
- understand some of the aspects of the development of the novel from realism to modernism, with reference to critical writing as well as the novels studied
- to have honed skills of close reading and critical interpretation
Course content overview:
This course covers a long historical period, from the full flowering of realism in Middlemarch to the 20th century shift into modernism with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The course will move through five significant novels as examples of different modes of 19th/20th century writing. We will discuss how these works attempted to depict subjective experience as well as the external world as they experimented with the representation of consciousness itself.
Teaching weeks will cover contextual and biographical details of the novelists and will introduce students to the major critical debates surrounding their work. There will be three main themes to which the course will return to offer points of comparison and contrast between each week's reading: i) the development of the novel form through the 19th and into the early 20th century, innovations in style and structure ii) the novel's interest in the social and economic world of Britain and Europe iii) understandings of subjectivity and identity in the novel, as well as the representations of personal and familial relationships.
Students will be expected to read all the novels in full and lectures and discussions will be conducted on the basis that students are familiar with their content. Additional reading will also be provided in the form contemporary reviews and critical essays. Wider reading will be suggested for students who wish to pursue it.
Students are expected to have read and be familiar with the following five novels:
Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch (1874) by George Eliot
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
Schedule (this course is completed entirely online):
Orientation Week: 5-11 September 2022
Teaching Weeks: 12 September-16 October 2022
Feedback Week: 17-23 October 2022
Teaching week 1 - Great Expectations: Dickens and the Novel
- Read and understand Great Expectations
- Begin to think about the main themes of the course (form, society, subjectivity)
Teaching week 2 - Middlemarch
- Become familiar with Middlemarch
- Attempt to close read selected passages to understand how the themes and plot of the novel correspond to its style and form
- Work to understand the role of the narrative voice in Middlemarch
- To reflect on its treatment of social themes and its depiction of subjectivity
Teaching week 3 - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
- Become familiar with the novel
- To reflect on its depiction and treatment of social themes, particularly Hardy's treatment of justice and the position of women in society
- The novel's experiments in form and style
- Analyse Hardy's style and understand how it develops the previous narrative address of realist fiction
Teaching week 4 - Dracula
- Understand how Stoker's novel, for all its supernatural content, can also be read in the context of 19th c. realism
- Reflect on the themes of modernisation and technology in the novel
- Develop an awareness of the novel's formal and structural innovations
Teaching week 5 - To the Lighthouse
- To gain an understanding of what literary modernism was and how a novelist such as Woolf frames her own practice in relation to previous traditions
- To contrast Woolf's psychological realism with the representation of interior lives we have seen depicted in the previous weeks' texts
- To close-read some sections of To the Lighthouse and analyse its style and form
A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.
What our students say
"This course has been very fruitful for me and has fulfilled my expectations. I have found new ways of approaching the literary texts studied. All your remarks have been productive and I have learnt a lot from all of you. And Jenny Bavidge's comments, our teacher's lessons, have been enlightening and outstanding. The reading of all the novels (particularly of those I had not read previously) has been very demanding but, all in all, rewarding."
"It really deepened my capability of analysing complex literature and allowed me to understand so much about the shift between realism and modernism that I would never have grasped with individual reading!"
"This course has been fascinating and ticked every box for me. My love of literature has been renewed and opened up new areas of understanding. I have found exactly the right level of challenge and enjoyed the positive feedback. I now look forward to the further reading recommended . I shall definitely be looking at other courses to take."
