Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture – (M.A.)

The field of nineteenth-century literature and culture has been a particularly dynamic one over recent years and this new MA course reflects this in both its structure and range of modules. It explores the engagement of nineteenth-century literature with a wide range of political, social and aesthetic issues, its variety of styles and genres, and both contemporary and modern critical perspectives.

Full-time students take a core course and one option module during the Autumn Term, and two further modules during the Spring Term. Part-time students take the core course during their first term, then one option module in each following Autumn and Spring Term.

The core course - Questioning the Victorians: Texts, Contexts and Afterlives - surveys the major literary and cultural developments in the period 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.

The option modules allow for more specialised study of particular issues relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and its historical, social and political contexts. A distinctive feature of this MA is the flexibility it provides for a student to specialize within the Victorian period or to explore a range of research interests across the nineteenth century, including interdisciplinary options from departments such as History and History of Art. Option modules may include:

* 'Ay me! ay me!': The First Person in Nineteenth-Century Poetry;
* Forms of Enquiry: Poetry and Poetics, 1850-1922;
* Victorian Historical Fictions;
* Strangers to Ourselves: Dickens and Collins;
* Victorian Performances;
* Cultures of Life Writing: the Victorians; Flaubert and After;
* Henry James;
* Byron. Interdisciplinary options may include: Radical Identities in Britain in the Age of Romanticism, 1819-1850;
* Gendering the Exotic, Exoticising Gender;
* Railway Nationalisms and Imperialisms;
* American Landscape in the Nineteenth-Century;
* Sculpture in England, 1848-99;
* Visuality and Painting in France and England 1850-1914.