MA Victorian Literature, Art and Culture

Programme Director: Dr Ruth Livesey

The Programme: Introduction

This lively MA programme co-ordinated by the Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies offers students the opportunity to study nineteenth-century literature and art history in the midst of the outstanding Victorian architecture of our Egham campus.

All students follow the core-course, Victorian London, which invites them to explore that rich subject through a variety of texts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, from Dickens, to the phenomenon of the department store, from the painters of fashionable life, to the panic surrounding the Whitechapel murders. Students also complete three other courses covering specialist areas of this rich period of literature and art:

• The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Theories, Readers
• The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution
• Aestheticism and Decadence in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Please note that links here are to current course information. Subject to validation, these courses will take the form of intensive 11 week programmes from September 2010 and hence the content currently listed for each programme is indicative but may not be replicated in entirety in the revised programme. Students also complete the compulsory unassessed course, ‘Methods and Materials of Research’ and write a dissertation on their chosen research specialism, supervised by a member of the course team.

The programme also offers the opportunity for selected students to take up an internship position for several weeks in the summer with one of a range of London libraries, museums and special archives with a special focus on the Victorian period.

The current programme director is Dr Ruth Livesey.

Please be advised that the English Department is currently making changes to the structure of its non-practice-based MA programmes that will come into effect in the Autumn of 2010.  The critical ethos of the programmes as newly configured will, however, be largely as indicated on these pages.

Structure and Teaching

For full-time students the course lasts an academic year from September to September; part-time students pursue the course over two years, completing ‘Victorian London’ and one or two other courses in their first year; the remaining course(s) from the four required in total and the dissertation in their second year [structure subject to validation].

All courses are taught by means of a weekly structured two-hour seminar and each course lasts for a term of 11 weeks in total. A full time student thus has four hours of seminars for two terms, plus one hour most weeks for ‘Methods and Materials of Research’ and then further dissertation workshops and discussion groups in the summer term, in addition to individual supervision in the process of completing dissertations. Students will be invited to prepare in-course presentations, will receive feedback on draft essays submitted at the beginning of the Spring term, and can see staff individually during their office hours. All students on the programme are also encouraged to attend the regular Nineteenth-Century Studies Reading Group meetings and the research seminars organised by the Centre for Victorian Studies.

Current Units (2010-11) Subject to Validation

Students take all four of the courses detailed below; or, in consultation with the programme director, select an option from another approved programme in the Arts Faculty. The exact content of units offered in any one year depend on the research interests of staff, although the core of each course remains largely similar each year. Revised booklets for the coming year are uploaded at the beginning of the Summer. All four courses will run every year, subject to the MA programme as a whole recruiting sufficient numbers of students.

PLEASE NOTE: COURSE BOOKLETS HERE RELATE TO THE CURRENT COURSE STRUCTURE AND GIVE A GOOD INDICATION OF THE CONTENT OF THE COURSES FROM 2010-11, BUT COURSES WILL BE DELIVERED IN CONCENTRATED 11 WEEK FORMAT IN FUTURE [SUBJECT TO VALIDATION]

 

 

 

 

• EN5801 Core Course: Victorian London (click here to download booklet)
• EN5817 The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Contexts; Theories Readers (click here to download booklet)
• EN5820 Aestheticism and Decadence in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (click here to download booklet)
• EN5807 The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution (click here to download booklet)

All students also complete Methods and Materials of Research in Term 1. The first five weeks will be seminars on researching and writing critical MA essays and dissertations, including use of footnotes, bibliography and using criticism. The second five weeks will be taught by the Computer Centre and will include an introduction to information technology, essay formatting, and advanced information retrieval, with special emphasis on journals and individual MA specific web-sites.

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Assessment

The programme consists of five assessed components and the compulsory, unassessed course, Methods and Materials. Each of the four taught course essays is weighted equally at 16.6% of the final mark for the degree. The dissertation is weighted at 33.3% of the overall mark.

All taught courses are examined by an essay of 4,500-5,000 words.

Coursework essays may be based on seminar presentations, or be original pieces of work. Essays written in the first term must be submitted by the first day of Term 2. These essays may be rewritten in the light of the tutor's comments and discussion and resubmitted in a final draft. Essays written in the second term must be submitted by the first day of term 3.

The dissertation will be a piece of original written work, of between 12,000 and 15,000 words (excluding bibliography and appendices). The topic of the dissertation will be agreed between the student and whichever member of staff is allotted as supervisor. Dissertations are submitted in the first week of September. Students may also be required to complete an unassessed research proposal and bibliography during the summer term.

Full details of course requirements, assessment regulations, and marking criteria are available in the MA Handbook. Please note this handbook currently refers to the academic year in progress and will be subject to revision for 2010-11.

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Internships

The optional Internships are a non-assessed additional extra to the programme and are intended to provide interested students with experience of working on a project connected with Victorian studies; such work may be of a traditional scholarly or archival sort, or may involves digitising texts, depending on the needs of our partner institutions in any one year. Interns in the past have worked in the following institutions: the British Library; the Library of the Victorian and Albert Museum and Linley Sambourne House, a unique Victorian resource and archive in Kensington.

All internship placements are dependent on partner institutions being able to offer suitable placements in any given year and the relevant staff at that institution being satisfied that applicants from the Programme are of a sufficiently high calibre to undertake the work required. Placements are much sought after and students should expect to have to apply formally for internships and undergo a competitive selection process including an interview with representatives of the participating institution and the MA Programme Director. A certain degree of flexibility is inevitable in the arrangements with regard to internships, since the specific projects that students work upon will be determined as much by the student's interests and the institutional requirements and facilities as they will by university structures.

All interns will be expected to produce a 700-1000 word report, providing feedback on the process of the internship as well as the practice for the benefit of Programme staff and our partner institutions. Failure to submit this report will not be penalised. It is frequently the case that students complete dissertations founded on the basis of research undertaken in the course of a placement. However, it must be noted that the assessment requirements of the dissertation are distinct from work completed in the course of the internship itself.

Please contact the Programme Director for more information about the Internship scheme.

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Course Staff

Dr Ruth Livesey (English). Programme Director. Author of Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Her research interests and publications include work on aestheticism and sexuality in the late nineteenth century; gender, class and narrative; urban culture and social exploration; the politics of genre in the mid-nineteenth-century novel. Her current project is entitled, The Stagecoach: A Vehicle of Thought on modernity and narrative 1740-1870. She is the Acting Director of the Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture.

Professor Adam Roberts (English). Deputy Programme Director. Author of Robert Browning Revisited (Twayne, 1996), Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: A Guide (Ashgate, 1999) and Victorian Culture and Society (Arnold 2003). He is the editor of The Oxford Authors: Browning (OUP, 1997, with Daniel Karlin) and The Oxford Authors: Tennyson (OUP, 2000), and was associate editor of The Oxford Readers Companion to Dickens (OUP, 1999). Forthcoming is an edition of Browning’s Greek poems for OUP (with Yopie Prins of University of Michigan).

Dr Mary Cowling Dr. Mary Cowling (Centre for Victorian Studies), Lecturer in the History of Victorian Art and Design, and Curator of the Royal Holloway Collection.  Major publications: The Artist as Anthropologist: the Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Victorian Figurative Painting: Domestic Genre and the Contemporary Social Scene, Andreas Papadakis, 2000;  text for the Website and online Virtual Gallery of the Royal Holloway Collection:  76 catalogue essays,  51 artists’ biographies and additional essays, 2006;  Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: the Royal Holloway Collection, Exhibition Catalogue, Art Services International,  Alexandria, Virginia, 2008; The Lure of the Past: Victorian Painters of History,  now with Yale University Press.  In process: The Pre-Raphaelites: Religion, Realism and Imagination (for Ashgate publishers, London).

Dr Sophie Gilmartin (English). Author of Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (CUP, 1998) and of essays on Victorian literature, art and cultural studies. Edited and wrote the introductory essay for the Penguin Classics edition of Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (2001). Forthcoming is a book on Thomas Hardy’s short stories (co-authored with Rod Mengham, University of Cambridge) for Edinburgh University Press. Her research interests include the role of narrative in the construction of ancestry, community and nationhood; mourning and wedding rituals in Victorian Britain and the empire; the representation of the widow in nineteenth-century literature and painting, and C19th maritime narratives and history. She is currently researching a book on two journeys around Cape Horn in the winter of 1856.

Dr Vicky Greenaway (English) received a Henry Moore postdoctoral fellowship in 2007-2008 to pursue her study of the links between 'Romantic poetry and sculpture'. Her research interests lie in literature's dialogue with the arts in the nineteenth century and more generally in the negotiation of ideal/real relations in nineteenth century poetics. Her AHRC funded PhD thesis 'Victorian literature and the Risorgimento' (completed March 2007) explored how Victorian writers appropriated the topic of the Italian nationalist movement in order to discuss their concerns over art's relation to society and the material world.

Dr Anne Varty (English); has research interests in literature of the late Victorian period, especially Pater, Wilde and the development of Aestheticism, and women’s writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Author of A Preface to Oscar Wilde (Longman, 1998); Eve’s Century: A Sourcebook of Writings on Women and Journalism 1890-1918 (Routledge, 1999); Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain. 'All Work, No Play' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is currently working on literatures of the British opium trade; the Victorian stage history of fairy tales; Oscar Wilde and the visual arts.

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Entry Requirements

Normally at least an upper second-class BA or the equivalent in an appropriate subject or one related to the topic of study. Most applicants will have degrees or majors in English, History, Drama, History of Art or Geography, but applicants with degrees in other subjects will be sympathetically considered. Students for whom English is not their first language must have appropriate qualifications (a minimum IELTS score of 7 in writing and 6 in other areas; or a TOEFL score of 600).

Apply Now

Please click here for the online application form.

For further course information

Contact in the first instance the postgraduate administrator Karen Kingsley.

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