230408 The Victorian Novel in Context (S) (WiSe 2005/2006)

In the 19th century, the English thought of themselves as a novel-reading nation - "from the Prime Minister to the last-appointed scullery-maid", as Anthony Trollope put it in 1870. This survey-style lecture course seeks to place the Victorian novel in its contexts, covering as broad a range of the novel's subgenres and aspects with which narrative fiction interacted in the Victorian era as possible - social, ideological, political, economic, technological, etc. One focus of attention in the discussion of individual texts will be the use of narrative techniques in relation to these contexts.

Authors whose work will be discussed in the sessions include Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Rider Haggard, Sarah Grand, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.

Einzelleistung: Graded final exam or term paper.

Students wishing to receive credit points will have to read two set texts (Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist and Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South), plus one additional text chosen from a reading list provided at the beginning of the semester.