Seminar Writing in Transition Victorian Poetry and Prose Di 14.30-16.00

Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, the term ‘Victorian’ has had a remarkably bad reputation. Conjuring up a fusty picture of steam engines, alienated factory labourers, stern patriarchs, unhappy women, inhuman asylums, and cane-wielding schoolmasters propagating old-fashioned values such as ‘duty’, ‘work’, ‘progress’ and ‘humanism’, whatever is branded ‘Victorian’ is immediately taken to be at odds with our contemporary modernity. Yet, while there is no denying that components of this picture can be found in the literature of the period, many Victorian writers were not only critical of the very values with which they are generally associated. More importantly, they saw themselves to be living in an -epoch of transition in the very foundations of belief and conduct” (Morley), in which the meaning of such terms as ‘God’, ‘nature’, ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’, ‘society’, ‘work’, ‘love’ or, indeed, ‘the human’ were subject to continuous controversy and profound transformation. As we shall see, this pervasive sense of transition and transformation gave rise to -a reckless diversity of writing” (Davis) that is more experimental, adventurous, ‘modernist’ and even comic than it is often taken to be. Although this course does not want to abandon the above image entirely, then, it is meant to operate as a corrective to it, encouraging students to carry out their own research into some of the lesser-known (though still canonical) texts of the period. We will study poems by Robert Browning (e.g. ‘Two in the Campagna’), Elizabeth B. Browning, Dante G. Rossetti (e.g. ‘Jenny’), Christina Rossetti (e.g. ‘Goblin Market’), Alfred Lord Tennyson (e.g. ‘The Lady of Shalott’) and Algernon Swinburne as well as prose texts (fiction, essays, philosophical pieces) by William Morris, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, J.S. Milll and Thomas Carlyle. Longer Set Texts (to be discussed in this order): Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus. Ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: OUP, 2008. William Morris. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin, 2012 (we will be discussing News from Nowhere as well as one or two of the essays contained in this edition). Please buy your own copies of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Morris's News from Nowhere. All other texts will be made available electronically. Suggested Introductory Reading: Philip Davis. The Victorians. (The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8: 1830- 1880). Oxford: OUP, 2002. Joseph Bristow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Herbert Tucker. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Wiley Blackwell, 1999 [new ed. 2014]. Anglistik IV: Modern English Literature Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2015/16 Dr. Erchinger Philipp