1. Home
  2. NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities
  3. Bachelor in Languages, Literatures and Cultures
  4. English and French Studies (Language 1 English; Language 2 French)
  5. English Victorian Literature

English Victorian Literature

Objectives

- To obtain knowledge about late nineteenth-century Victorian literature and the empire, namely the Scramble for Africa

- To develop critical interpreting skills

- To learn how to relate texts and how to read them within historical and social contexts

- To learn how to do research work, namely how to consult and use databases such as JSTOR, SCOPUS and the Victorian Web and how to organize a research paper - To produce a group research project on one of the topis of the syllabus to be presented nd discussed in class - To produce a final written test

General characterization

Code

01101076

Credits

6.0

Responsible teacher

Alda Maria Jesus Correia

Hours

Weekly - 4

Total - 168

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

N/A

Bibliography

Adams, James (2009). A History of Victorian Literature. Wiley-Blackwell.


Altick, Richard (1998). The English Common Reader – a Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago: Univ of Chicago P.


Bauer, Helen Pike (1994). Rudyard Kipling, a study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.


Brady, Kristin (1982). The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan.


Brantlinger, Patrick e Thesing, William, eds. (2002). A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Blackwell.


Carrington, Charles E. (1972). ’Baa Baa Black Sheep’: Fact or Fiction. Kipling Journal, 39, 7-14.


Conrad, Joseph (1996). Heart of Darkness - Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays. Ed. Ross Murfin. Palgrave Macmillan.


Daniel, Anne Margaret (1997). Kipling’s use of verse and prose in ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 37, No. 4, Nineteenth Century, 857-875.


Deirdre, David, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge UP.


Fielding, Penny, ed. (2010). The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.


Glancy, Ruth (1980). Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35(1), 53-72.


Harris, Sally (2003). Spiritual Warnings:  The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Victorians Institute Journal 31, 9-39.


Hill, Richard J. (2017). Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text – a Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel. London: Routledge.


Jones, Lawrence (1975). Thomas Hardy’s ‘Idiosyncratic Mode of Regard’, ELH, 42, 433-459.


King, Andrew et al, eds. (2016). The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Routledge.


Marroni, Francesco (1992). ’The Three Strangers’ and the verbal representation of Wessex. Thomas Hardy Journal, 8.2, 26-39.


Margree, Victoria (2020). Teaching Victorian Short Fiction, Victorian Popular Fictions, 2: 2.


Milbank, Alison (2002). The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880. In Jerrold Hogle (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic (pp. 145-165). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.


Orel, Harold (2010). The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. Cambridge UP.


Prentiss, Norman (1993). The Poetics of Interruption in Hardy’s Poetry and Short Stories. Victorian Poetry, 31.1, 41-60.


Ray, Martin (1997). Thomas Hardy – a textual study of the short story. Vermont: Ashgate.


Sage, Victor (2004). Le Fanu’s Gothic: the Rhetoric of Darkness. London: Palgrave.


Saposnik, Irving (1966). Stevenson’s ‘Markheim’: A Fictional ‘Christmas Sermon’. Nineteenth Century Fiction, 21.3, 277-82.


Shaw, Patricia (1989). Sheridan Le Fanu: Master of the Occult, the Uncanny and the Ominous. Bells: Barcelona English language and Literature Studies, vol. 1, 189-206.


Shippey, Thomas A. e Short, Michael (1972). Framing and Distancing in Kipling’s ‘The Man who would be King’. Journal of Narrative Tecnique 2, 75-87.


Stevenson, R. L. (2022). The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Complete Annotated Edition. Ed. Leslie Klinger. Penzler Publishers.


 Thomas, Deborah (1982). Dickens and the Short Story. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.


Thompson, N. D. (2000). Victorian Women Writers  and the Woman Question. Cambridge UP.


Tompkins, J. M. S. (1966). The Art of Rudyard Kipling. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.


Williams, Merryn (1976). A Preface to Hardy. London: Longman.


 

Teaching method

-Lectures, reading and critical interpretation of texts in class discussion - c. 70%

-Work presentation classes - c. 30%

Evaluation method

1 final test - 50%

- 1 group (or individual) work presented orally and submitted online - 50%

Subject matter

1. Victorian narrative: the reading public and literary culture; the press and periodicals; serial publication; the short story and the novel.

2. The gothic narrative - darkness and disquiet in Sheridan Le Fanu: “The Watcher”

3. Charles Dickens and the connection with the public - the short story as a “commodity”; the impressionist sketch and the dramatic monologue: “A Christmas Tree” and “George Silverman's Explanation”; fact vs. imagination: Hard Times

4. Thomas Hardy - the same search for local community traditions in short stories and novels: “The Three Strangers”, “The Fiddler of the Reels”; Tess of the D'Ubervilles.

5. Robert Louis Stevenson - difficulties and successes: “Markheim” and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

6. Rudyard Kipling - a literary career based on the short story and the development of formal techniques: “The Man who Would be King”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, “Mrs Bathurst”

7. The later years: 1. feminist and decadent narrators; 2. Joseph Conrad and the narrative about the empire: Heart of Darkness