MA Module
Course Tutor: Dr Trev Broughton
The century from the accession of Victoria until the flowering of modernism was a golden age of Life writing in English. The legacy of Romanticism, the ethos of selfimprovement and the gradual democratisation of literacy combined to encourage new constituencies to inscribe and explore their own and others ’ subjectivities. Intellectuals such as J. S. Mill and Leslie Stephen, novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret
Oliphant and Virginia Woolf, and otherwise non-literary citizens such as maid-servant
Hannah Cullwick and Crimean doctress Mary Seacole explored the possibilities of Life writing for many different purposes. This module interrogates a field of textual production not usually available to students of English Literature, and introduces candidates to important dialogues across disciplines.
Cultures of Life Writing analyses a range of genres – travel writing, diary, letters, autobiography, memoir, ‘ autobiografiction ’ in order to prompt reflection on some of the following:
 Constructions of the self, subjectivity and authority
 Narratives of becoming, childhood, education, socialisation, professionalisation
 The place of life-writing genres in manuscript and print cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
 the circulation, reception, dissemination and reputation of life writings
 the waning of ‘ Victorian ’ modes of thinking and writing, and the emergence of modern, or modernist, idioms.
 the way life-writing texts claim – or repudiate – truthfulness, interiority, value.
Interdisciplinary in orientation, this is a literary module with a strong valence towards historical context and research as well as an emphasis on close analysis of individual texts and passages. Participants will be encouraged to use available digital resources to reveal new intertextual patterns and connections, and thus to generate original ideas to work on in essays. Don ’ t worry, I ’ ll explain all this as we go along.
The variety of genres and authors available to us means that, as well as thinking about questions of genre and textuality, we can explore a number of themes: class, gender,
‘ race ’ , work, illness, sexuality, authorship, religion, etc. I ’ m happy to respond to the interests and suggestions of the group. We can also encounter, in informal settings, some of the ‘ big hitters ’ of nineteenth-century thought: Carlyle, Mill, Martineau, Ruskin.
Primary Reading, which you should try to get hold of and read in advance, will include
Margaret Oliphant The Autobiography (ed. Elisabeth Jay – this edition is very good and available cheaply secondhand on Amazon etc)Oxford
Elizabeth C. Gaskell The Life of Charlotte Bront ë (ed. Elisabeth Jay) Penguin Classics

Mary Seacole The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin pref.)
John Ruskin Praeterita (ed. Francis O ’ Gorman) Oxford World ’ s Classics
Edmund Gosse Father and Son (Michael Newton ed.) Oxford World ’ s Classics
William Hale White The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford Oxford World ’ s Classics
Anthony Trollope An Autobiography (any good edition)
John Stuart Mill Autobiography (ed. John Robson) Penguin Classics
Provisional outline of the programme
Week 2 Diaries
Passages from Hannah Cullwick (Victorian maidservant and diarist), Francis
Kilvert (minister), Jane Welsh Carlyle (will be made available by TB)
Week 3 Childhoods
Passages from Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Trollope (Martineau will be made available by TB)
Week 4 Autobiography
Anthony Trollope An Autobiography
Margaret Oliphant Autobiography
Week 5 Travels/War
Mary Seacole The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands
Week 6 Letters
Carlyle Letters Online, Passages from Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle
Week 7 Cultures of Biography
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bront ë
Week 8 Love and Loss
Margaret Oliphant Autobiography
Leslie Stephen Mausoleum Book
Week 9 Transitions: Victorian to Modern
[William Hale White] Mark Rutherford ’ s Autobiography
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son
Leslie Stephen, Mausoleum Book
.
Organisation
The module will be taught by two-hour weekly seminar. The completion of all required reading and viewing is assumed for each seminar. Each week I will also suggest supplementary reading, as well as research exercises of various kinds. My idea is that

each week close reading of particular texts/passages will be complemented by considerations of genre, as well as by intertextual research of your own which we will circulate at class or in advance. For instance, our reading of Mary Seacole might be contexualised within a discussion of other texts of the Crimean war, such as journalism, memoir, poetry.
Assessment
One 4500-word essay for formal assessment by Week 1 of Summer Term 2014