Period of English 1750-1880 (Norman Vance): Preliminary Information
This module will be taught through weekly seminars supported by weekly lectures.
For the first seminar come prepared to discuss Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Further
information and a week-by-week course outline will be issued then.
The module seeks to engage with some late-eighteenth-century writing, with
Romanticism and with Victorianism. It would be useful to acquire some background
knowledge before the course begins by looking at at least one title in both section A
and section B below, recommended both for introductory reading and for subsequent
reference. In addition, as you will see from section C, the provisional list of texts to
be covered, there are some important long novels such as Bleak House and Adam
Bede which it would be really helpful to read in advance if possible.
List A: historical background
Paul Langford, Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000) (inexpensive paperback)
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783-1867 (London: Longman, 1979)
Norman McCord, British History 1815-1906 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
K.Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846-1886 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998)
Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1965)
List B: cultural background
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Revolutionaries: English Literature and its
Background 1780-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge,
1993)
Patrick Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing, eds., A Companion to the Victorian Novel
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
List C: possible order of texts to be discussed week by week
Jane Austen, Emma
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Wordsworth, Poems; Prelude Bk 1
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poems
John Keats, Poems
Alfred Tennyson, Poems
Robert Browning, Men and Women
Matthew Arnold, Poems, Culture and Anarchy
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Norman Vance, B341 (r.n.c.vance@sussex.ac.uk