This topic is designed to give you the opportunity to engage with Victorian popular fiction in historical context. We will explore questions of canon, genre and readership through the study of a wide variety of texts. The course will introduce some of the methodologies used by modern critics for examining popular literature and will encourage you to make connections between your reading for this course and any engagement you may already have had with ‘canonical’ or ‘high culture’ texts of the period. But it will not be assumed that you have taken any other class in Victorian literature.

We will read examples of Victorian bestseller serials (such as Dickens’s Oliver Twist), ‘penny dreadfuls’, sensation fiction (such as Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower); we will explore emerging popular genres including detective fiction (including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and ghost stories; we will see how popular fiction engaged in contemporary social debates (for instance, Sarah Grand’s feminist masterpiece The Beth Book or Hesba Stretton’s story of a destitute orphan, Jessica’s First Prayer) and how it contributed to Victorian understandings of sexuality (eg. Charlotte Bronte’s JaneEyre and the anonymously published Rosa Fielding, Or, A Victim of Lust).

Welcome to the American Gothic topic paper.  We'll be looking at ghosties, ghouls, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night, in a diverse group of texts ranging from Early American fiction to the twentieth century.

The course will consist of seven weekly ninety-minute seminars.

No sooner did Victorian fiction settle on the realist novel as its most authoritative way of exploring human relationships, social problems and the truths of everyday life, than a variety of rival forms sprang up to contest realism’s methods and concerns.

This course gives students the opportunity to engage with canonical and less-known Victorian fiction and to help them think critically about issues of genre, authorship and readership. It will locate key Victorian novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s Barchester series in the context of modern and contemporary critical accounts of realism, exploring the political and aesthetic implications of realism in fiction. But at the same time as realism was coming to dominate mainstream fiction, several important kinds of anti-realism were also developing their claims to the public imagination. Among these were fiction based on the supernatural and occult, on magic, fantasy and experimental techniques. Accordingly, students will read a selection of anti-realist Victorian texts including ghost stories and mid-century fantasy novels (such as George MacDonald’s Phantastes), as well as exploring late-century Decadence via Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic and occult classic Under the Hill, Olive Schreiner’s Dreams, and others.

Having explored both avowedly realist and anti-realist fiction, the course will go on to investigate how viable the distinction between the two is by reading Dickens, Thackeray, Emily Bronte and others who use some of the techniques of fantasy within a broadly realist framework.