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 conceptions dealt with range from Dickens’s slums to Jerrold and Doré’s romanticising views of urban poverty 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 foregrounding of the visual in the construction of urban realities as well as to the connection between different conceptual approaches to the city (that of the flâneur, that of the social critic) and the respective aesthetic devices employed.
Please get hold of and read the following texts:
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage
George Gissing, Grub Street
William Morris, News from Nowhere
Additional material will be made available at the beginning of the semester. |
