ESH279 - Victorian Fictions - 2024/25

This module will introduce students to a range of Victorian fiction. It addresses the content, form, and significance of the Victorian novel (famously nicknamed a ‘loose baggy monster’) and how it develops amid the cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts of nineteenth-century Britain. It also examines the alternative form of the short story and considers what specific kinds of narrative and narrative effects this form enables. Authors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, Bram Stoker, and William Thackeray.