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.