A wide range of elective modules reflects the Centre staff's research interests in nineteenth-century literature, social history, history of art, the history of science, life-writing and much more. It is taught by members of the School of English, together with members of the Department of History of Art and Film, and the School of Historical Studies (including the Centre for English Local History).

Course structure and module descriptions

Descriptions of option modules (School of English website)

Course Structure

The taught element consists of two core modules, one on Approaches to Victorian Literature and Culture, and one on Victorian Society. These are combined with two optional modules chosen from the following:

Evolution and Entropy: Representations of the Sciences in Victorian Literature

Charles Dickens

Modern Regional Cultures: Approaches and Skills

Modern Regional Societies

The English Country House in Literature

Vices and Virtues: Behaving and Misbehaving in British Society

Women in Literature, Culture and Society, 1850-1900

Managing Knowledge: Dictionaries and Ideology

Literature and Culture in 1859

Victorian Lives: Life-writing in the Victorian Period

Narrative: Theories, Texts and Practices

Understanding English and Welsh Communities and Cultures, 1800-2000

Assessment

Each of the four modules are assessed by an essay of between 4,000 and 5,000 words. In addition, students must submit a dissertation of not more than 20,000 words by 15 September of the year in which the taught course is completed.

The Timetable

The course may be taken in one year (12 months) full-time or two years (24 months) part-time. Part-time students take the core modules in their first year and the optional modules in their second year. The core modules are taught on Wednesdays in the first and second semesters. The options are taught on other days of the week.

Modules

Bibliography, Research Methods and Writing Skills

Students also take the compulsory course on Bibliography, Research Methods and Writing Skills on Wednesday morning in the autumn semester.

Approaches to Victorian Literature and Culture

The module takes three different approaches to the study of Victorian literature and culture.  The first is to look at the oeuvre of a particular author, considering the development of an author's ideas and literary techniques across their career, and examining their writing in different genres.  The second is to consider a particular theme in Victorian literature and culture, tracking this concern in writing (and the visual arts) across the entire period, and examining how the theme is dealt with in radically different ways in a variety of genres.  The third is to focus on a particular portion of the Victorian age, attempting to understand how literary texts produced in that historical 'moment' engaged both with contemporary events and with each other.

Victorian Society

We study the Victorians by getting close to the Victorians' view of themselves. Our thinking, therefore, will engage in the first place with nineteenth-century ideas - beginning with the idea of a Social Science. We will always endeavour to see these ideas as of their time and place, as befitting lived experience. Teaching will be a mixture of informal lectures and discussions, short student papers and other means of garnering empathy and understanding. Throughout, 'Victorian' will be understood as less than an epoch but more than a queen. We will go beyond her reign into a long nineteenth-century ~ 1790-1914.

Modern Regional Cultures: Approaches and Skills

This course introduces key subjects, questions and approaches for the comparative analysis of regional cultural history in England and Wales between the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. These will include attitudes to gender and family, landscape painting, regional literature, Victorian photography, religious geographies, anthropological approaches, gypsies and alternative cultures. Sessions on early modern paleography will concentrate on the practical ability to read documents in secretary hand which may either be considered as cultural texts in their own right or which provide information on, for example, material culture.

Modern Regional Societies since c. 1650

This module discusses comparatively the structures and features of local societies and economies, teaching appropriate research skills, and considering the changes that occurred before, during, and after industrialisation. Subjects covered include welfare provision, historical demography and migration, agricultural change, the Victorian city, modern community studies and oral history. Sources examined include listings of inhabitants, the census, records and welfare and the poor law.

Vices and Virtues: Behaving and Misbehaving in British Society

Using the theme of 'vices and virtues', this module examines everyday practices, behaviour and consumption in the period 1880-1980.  Topics to be discussed in weekly seminars are: environment and behaviour; urbanity and youth; sex and space; drugs and Orientalism; tobacco and gender; alcohol and class; thrift and power (including gambling); manners and the civilising process; and cleanliness, time and material culture.

Understanding English and Welsh Communities and Cultures, 1800-2000

The aims are to augment knowledge and comparative understanding of regional English and Welsh communities and cultures, covering essential themes relating to these fields, and the approaches and theory used in their study. The module will enhance research skills and versatility, knowledge of historical sources, written communication, critical historical judgement, and related interpretation. It imparts inter-disciplinary methods and skills: literary approaches, pictorial interpretation, oral history, methods in cultural and religious geography, and ethnological and anthropological approaches (e.g. on the gypsies). It relates historical knowledge to present-centred issues and problems (e.g. heritage-related issues, gypsies, literary repute and local investment, welfare systems and their problems, xenophobia, gender relations, secularisation, landscape interpretation). It develops an historical dimension to aesthetic judgements; teaches interpretation of artistic motifs, landscape painting and memorial styles; explores a great variety of sources relating to these themes, and ways of interpreting them, and the relevant legal frameworks.