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Lehrende/r: Dr. habil. Susanne Schmid
Veranstaltungsart:
Vorlesung
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
BS 412
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | -
Inhalt:
If the Victorian age (1837-1901) is sometimes associated with a certain kind of conservatism and prudishness, it also stands for scientific and technological advance, social reform, and immense cultural productivity. Our lecture will deal with aspects as diverse as the Industrial Revolution, the growing cities, the Empire, changes made to the countryside, the role of women, the status of art, aestheticism, and the Victorian predilection for "Earnestness." After a brief peek at what happened before Victoria's ascension to the throne, we will read and analyze a number of texts - novels, stories, a play, poems, travel writing, and essays - central to the Victorian age: Emily Brontë's late Romantic and highly emotional novel Wuthering Heights idealizes the wild Yorkshire landscape, which is far from the industrial cities. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist will lead us into the London underworld. Just before Christmas, we will focus on the Victorian Christmas traditions, influenced by the famous Christmas Carol, again by Dickens. Rudyard Kipling's poems and stories ("The White Man's Burden," the Just So Stories) will exemplify British attitudes to the expansion of territory and to colonization. H.G. Wells's late-Victorian science fiction novella The Time Machine will show the skepticism contemporaries felt in the face of technological change. Finally, we will look at the fin-de-siècle theatre scene and Oscar Wilde's dramatic output. In addition to the longer texts, we will study poems by Tennyson and Rossetti as well as Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Please make sure that you read Wuthering Heights until the second week of the semester.
Empfohlene Literatur:
Reading:
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor (London: Penguin Classic, 2003).
Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol," in A Christmas Carol and Other Writings, ed. Michael Slater (London: Penguin Classic, 2011), 27-117.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin Classics, 2012).
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Marina Warner (London: Penguin Classics, 2005).
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Richard Cave (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), 291-358.
A number of shorter texts will be available on ReaderPlus.
Recommended introductory reading: http://www.victorianweb.org/
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