Scope: This course is designed to explore aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture in some depth and to a degree of critical sophistication appropriate to a third-year unit. It will range across a number of genres including novels, poetry, journalism, science writing, autobiography, history, art criticism and introduce elements of contemporary visual culture. The course is arranged into seven pairs of linked sessions, the first session of each pair introducing an aspect of nineteenth-century social thought and cultural practice (generally through non-fictional prose) and the second exploring a major nineteenth-century text in the light of these ideas. The course concentrates on the period from the late 1830s to the early 1870s.

The seven topic clusters that will form the focus of the course are: ideas of economy; geology, time and extinction; progress, Darwinism and evolution; masculinity, femininity and self-writing; psychology, mind and madness; sexuality, poetics and aesthetics; history, nation and revolution.

The following texts will be studied during the course and you should read as many of these as possible over the summer vacation:

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Penguin 1985)
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Adrian Poole)
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (Norton Edition ed. Robert Ross)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin edition)
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
'Maud' in Tennyson: The Oxford Authors (ed. Adam Roberts OUP 2000)
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Penguin edition)
Swinburne Anactoria (1866),
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862).
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (OUP, 1996)
A. S. Weber (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Science: An Anthology (Broadview, 2000)

Teaching: One one-hour lecture and one one-hour seminar each week for the Autumn Term and for the first half of the Spring Term.

Coursework:One peer-led small group activity relating to that week's text.

Assessment: One mid-term 2,000 word essay (20%), plus one essay of 5,000-6,000 words (80%)