Course details || Module aims || Content || Learning and teaching || Learning outcomes || Assessment

Course details

• (Special Subject, Year 3, Semester 1)

• Credits: 20

• Convenor: Dr Holly Furneaux

• Course code: EN3140

Module aims

This course examines the many ways in which the love that famously 'dare not speak its name' does receive articulation in a wide range of texts produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Students are invited to explore and complicate Foucault's momentous statement that homosexuality, as an identity, came into being in the late nineteenth century with the sexological coinage of the term. 

Sensitive to competing histories of sexuality, and modern queer and gender theories we will explore the representation of both male and female same-sex desire in the period 1750-1850. While discussing sexuality in a historical context, we will also address issues that continue to be of urgent importance today: homophobia, bodily practice, the possibility of the queer family, and the significance of class, race and nationality in the experience and representation of sexuality.

Content

In demonstrating the diversity of treatments of same-sex desire in this period, the course takes in material from the canonical to the obscene. 

Reading novels from such 'respectable' authors as:

•  Tobias Smollett (The Adventures of Roderick Random and extracts from The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle);
• Charles Dickens (David Copperfield and Little Dorrit).

Alongside pornographic writing, including:

• John Cleland's erotic classic Memoirs of Women of Pleasure or Fanny Hill.

We ask questions about what constitutes canonicity, and how such generic distinctions are drawn and policed. As well as other novels (such as Maria Edgworth's Belinda) and novelias we will also consider poetry (for example, short works by Daniel Defoe and extracts from Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam), anonymous tracts, diaries (such as that of Anne Lister), autobiography and recent critical writing. Longer works will be strategically spaced throughout the course allowing ample time for preparatory reading and thinking.

Learning and teaching

The modules will be delivered by two hour seminars, in which students' directed individual reading will be supported through structured debate and large and small group discussion. Each student will be asked to offer a short (5-10 minute) unassessed oral presentation on one of the course texts.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module students will be able to...

• discuss sexuality and gender within a historical context, sensitive to class, race and nationality;
• demonstrate familiarity with a range of recent queer and gender theory as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of sexuality;
• bring that historical and critical understanding to bear upon texts from a variety of genres, including poetry, novels and journalism;
• accurately use and distinguish between complex terms including queer, gay, lesbian, gender, masculinity, femininity, transgender, transvestite and pornography.

Assessment

One 5,000-essay.

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