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This course explores the literature of the period ranging from 1830 (when Tennyson’s first volume of poems was published) to 1900 (the last months of Queen Victoria’s reign before her death in January 1901). Often described as ‘the Age of the Novel’, the course naturally devotes considerable space to nineteenth-century fiction, but also pays close attention to the directions taken by poetry and non-fiction.

Autumn term lectures include an overview of the period followed by a lecture on each of the nine set texts. Seminar groups study at least four of the set texts. In 2022-23, the set texts were Tennyson’s selected poems, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ¶Ù¾±³¦°ì±ð²Ô²õ’s Great Expectations, Robert Browning’s selected poems, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Christina Rossetti’s selected poems, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hopkins’s selected poems, and Wilde’s plays. (Set texts are subject to change.)

Spring term lectures are structured around the major literary genres of the period, such as sage writing, condition of England writing, nonsense poetry, sensation fiction, decadent writing, and the gothic. Writers explored through these lectures include Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry James, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, H. G. Wells, and many others.

Spring term seminars are sign-up options; options in the past have included ‘Romance in Poetry', ‘Great Victorian Novels’, ‘The Victorians and Art’, ‘Gothic’, ‘How to Do Things with Books’, ‘Colonial writing and fictions of Empire’, ‘People Behaving Badly’, and ‘Exoticism and the Supernatural’.

Examination is by means of an exam paper or by Course Essay, if preferred and if no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year.