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Die Teilnahmerzahl des Seminars ist auf 20 Studierende beschränkt. Bitten melden Sie sich vor Semesterbeginn unter AGNES an. In 1870, Anthony Trollope enthusiastically claimed that "we have become a novel-reading people, from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid." The novel had undoubtedly become the most popular genre in the second half of the nineteenth century. The aim of this class is to introduce students to the formal variety of the kinds of novels available to the British "novel-reading people." Since it is impossible to survey the development of the Victorian novel in depth in the course of a single semester, we are going to read three novels that exemplify different generic permutations of mid nineteenth-century fiction. After a couple of introductory sessions concerned with the historical and cultural contexts of the Victorian novel (social and political contexts, the literary marketplace, etc.), we will discuss generic similarities and dissimilarities of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860). Collins's Woman in White has to be read by the beginning of the semester; the following editions are recommended: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford University Press, 1998) George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford University Press, 1996) |
