Level of study Third/Final year
Credit value 20
Pre-requisite modules You must have completed at least two years of appropriate study in this discipline.
The course will examine a selection of Thomas Hardy's novels, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and his Society Comedies. It will ask students to study these works in the light of some of some major social and cultural issues at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This will include contemporary debates about gender, the emergence of what recent critics have identified as the figure of the 'modern homosexual', and what the Victorians called the 'Woman Question'. They will also include issues such as the rise of consumerism and the 'culture industry' and its effect on literary art; and the role of formal and informal patterns of literary censorship. Students should be aware that the course will involve reading a number of long Victorian novels.