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).