With its focus on Victorian London, this module is dedicated to the representation of urban spaces in various genres and media against the backdrop of a quickly changing and ever expanding metropolis. The sources dealt with range from Dickens’s slums to Jerrold and Doré’s romanticising views of urban poverty to versions of the urban gothic to Morris’s utopian vision of a London returned to nature. Our analyses will be based on a number of fictional and non-fictional texts (novels, stories, letters, diaries, scientific investigations and cultural analyses) as well as some visual material (illustrations, paintings). We will pay particular attention to the connection between different approaches to the city (e.g. that of the flâneur or the social critic or the detective) and the respective aesthetic devices employed in the texts to be discussed.
Please get hold of and read the following texts:
Part I:
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Robert L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
William Morris, News from Nowhere
Part II:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Additional material will be announced/ made available at the beginning of the semester. |
