Module Director: Dr R Dover
Level: M, Semester 2, Year 1 Credit Value: 30
Module Aims:
· to intensively survey the range of Edwardian and post-Edwardian literature, published in the period between 1901 and 1914
· to chart the responses to social, political and historical contexts within this period, with particular reference to issues of nationalism and national identity, social reform, and the relationships between literature and the spectrum of political discourse within the period.
· to trace the developments within forms of literary and artistic expression within this period and, through detailed and systematic exploration, to show how literary texts forms and genres veered between consolidation and experimentation, and to further explore some of the determining forces which underpinned these transformations
· to trace the influence, and textual embodiment, of intellectual and cultural developments in the literature of this period.
· To explore the material determinants upon, and sociological development of, literary practice within the wider context of cultural processes within this period.
Indicative Content:
Questions of Englishness and the Condition of England, with reference to the continuing tradition of ruralist/pastoralist sympathy in writing of the Edwardian period. This will include consideration of the “Condition of England” texts (Forster’s Howards End, CFG Masterman’s The Condition of England, Gaslworthy’s The Island Pharisees, and Wells’ Tono Bungay), in the more general concern with national identity, national allegorising and national character within Edwardian literary texts, seen in texts such as Ford Madox Ford’s The English, Forster’s The Longest Journey, the work of the ‘Georgian Poets’. Reference will also be made to the sub-genre of the Edwardian Country House novel and of the “Great Good Place”.
Issues of Imperialism and the Retreat from Imperialism, with reference to Conrad (Heart of Darkness and Nostromo) and to the more general intellectual and cultural debates regarding Imperialism after 1901 (Conan Doyle, Roger Casement, Kipling, and John Buchan).
The traditions of Edwardian fairies, folklore and whimsy. Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, the short stories of Saki, J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, Forster’s and Kipling’s short stories (for example, ‘They’ and ‘An Inhabitation Enforced’), the ghost stories of M R James. Consideration also of the cultural and ideological bases for the popularity of such texts within the period.
Revaluations of Victorianism and the oedipal revolt against the Victorian Father. Reference to works such as Edmund Gosse (Father and Son) and Samuel Butler (the posthumously published The Way of All Flesh)
The “Soul’s Awakening” and new constructions of the self. The Edwardian vogue for narratives of protestant self-realisation and, allied to the assimilation of Freudian and Bergsonian theory, new emphases on personal authenticity. Works for consideration would include George Moore’s The Lake, Forster’s A Room With a View, and D H Lawrence’s The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers.
Gender, Sexuality and the “Woman Question”. Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns, Wells’s Anna Veronica, Shaw’s Pygmalion.
“The New Age” and the birthpangs of early British modernism. Consideration of advanced intellectual opinion and artistic practice within the period, including reference to the development of Imagism and Symbolism within the Edwardian period (T E Hulme), the assimilation of Nietzschian philosophy (Shaw’s Man and Superman)
Edwardian popular literature and culture: Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands, the novels of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Farnol. General trends within popular literature, (for example, the vogue for historical and adventure romances, or the Edwardian silver-fork novel), will also be studied and some attempt made to consider the cultural and ideological bases for their popularity.
Continuity and consolidation in the development of British poetry, including consideration of the development of Symbolism and Imagism within Edwardian poetry, and the developing poetic careers of Hardy, Yeats and T E Hulme.
Teaching and Learning Strategies:
The module will be taught using a mixture of tutor-led seminars, tutor lectures, and the use of occasional outside speakers.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the module students should be able to:
· demonstrate an understanding of the key terms of development within English literary culture (in drama, poetry and narrative), and suggest underlying reasons for these patterns of development
· through the close analysis of individual texts, trace some of the ways in which texts of this period express or represent, through form and content, responses to specific cultural, social, political and ideological contexts.
· explore and account for the impact of intellectual, philosophical and/or scientific ideas on literary culture within Edwardian and post-Edwardian period.
· show evidence of an understanding of the complex relationships between issues of society, ideology and literary texts, as witnessed in responses to issues such as Imperialism, questions of national identity and destiny, ruralism, or social class and social reform within this period.
· be able to demonstrate an active and critical response to issues of the location of literature within ‘culture’ within this period, and to further demonstrate an understanding of the sociological, economic and cultural realities of literary culture.
· demonstrate an ability to apply various critical and interpretative strategies to the analysis of literary texts in sustained and self-critical ways.
Assessment:
Assessment will be undertaken through the submission of one 5,000 word extended essay, which will demonstrate evidence of detailed understanding, critical depth, interpretative subtlety, and judicious consideration and evaluation of published criticism.
Indicative Bibliography
Core Texts
[Not all of the following will be studied in depth, although it is recommended that students read as many of the following as possible. In certain instances, most notably for poetry, course sessions will make use of tutor-prepared extracts]
Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns, (1902)
The Old Wives’ Tale (1908)
Clayhanger (1910)
Rupert Brook, Poems (1911)
1914 and Other Poems (1915)
Samuel Butler The Way of All Flesh (1903)
G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1902)
Nostromo (1904)
Under Western Eyes (1911)
E M Forster A Room With a View (1908)
The Longest Journey (1907)
Howards End (1910)
The Celestial Omnibus (1911)
Maurice (w. 1913)
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
Strife (1909)
The Island Pharisees (1904)
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, (1907)
Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1902)
Henry James The Ambassadors (1903)
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
Rewards and Fairies (1910)
D H Lawrence, The White Peacock (1911)
Sons and Lovers (1913)
E Marsh, (ed.) Georgian Poetry (Vols I and II)
George Moore, The Lake (1903)
G B Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
Major Barbara (1907)
George Sturt, Change in the Village (1912)
H G Wells In the Days of the Comet (1906 )
Kipps, (1905)
Tono Bungay, (1909)
W B Yeats The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Responsibilities (1914)
Secondary and General Texts
J Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence, (Macmillan, 1977)
L Andersen, Bennett, Wells, and Conrad: Narrative in Transition, (Macmillan, 1986)
J Arac and H Ritvo, Macropolitics of Nineteenth Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism Imperialism, (Pennsylvania, 1991)
C Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848-1932 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1983)
J Batchelor, The Edwardian Novelists, (Duckworth, 1982)
C Bedient, Architects of the Self (California UP, 1972)
M Bell (ed) The Context of English Literature:1900-1930, (Methuen, 1980)
W Bellamy, The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy (Routledge, 1971)
M Bradbury, The Social Context of English Literature (Blackwell, Oxford, 1971)
J H Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildingsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, 1973)
C Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting, 1900-1914 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1994)
J A V Chapple, Documentary and Imaginative Literature 1880-1920, (Blandford, 1970)
J Colmer, E M Forster: The Personal Voice (Routledge, 1975)
R Colls and P Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (Croom Helm, 1986)
C B Cox and A E Dyson, (eds.) The Twentieth Century Mind, History Ideas and Literature in Britain: 1900-1918 (OUP, 1972)
E Delavenay, D H Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition (Heinemann, 1971)
T Eagleton, Exiles and Emigres (Chatto and Windus, 1970)
R Ebbatson, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914 (Harvester, Brighton, 1980)
R Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster Lawrence (Harvester, Brighton, 1982)
L Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel, (Peter Smith, Gloucester Mass., 1972)
R Ellman, (ed), Edwardians and Late Victorians (Columbia, 1960)
A Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics (Baltimore, 1967)
K Flint, The Woman Reader: 1837-1914, (OUP, 1993)
B Ford (ed), The Modern Age, (Harmondsworth, 1971)
W Frierson, The English Novel in Transition (Norman, 1942)
H Gerber, The English Short Story in Transition, 1880-1920 (New York, 1967)
M Green, The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: the Doom of Empire (Routledge, 1984)
J Hawthorne, The British Working Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984)
S Heath, The Sexual Fix, (Macmillan, 1982)
J Hunter, Edwardian Fiction, (Harvard UP, 1982)
R Huntley, The Alien Protagonist, (North Carolina UP, Chapel Hill, 1970)
S Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, (Princeton UP, Princeton, 1968)
S Hynes, Edwardian Occasions, (Routledge. 1972)
P Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 (Secker and Warburg, 1989)
H Kingsmill, After Puritanism, (Duckworth, 1929)
J Lester, Conrad and Religion, (Macmillan, 1986)
J A Lester, Journey Through Despair: Transformations in British Literary Culture (Princeton UP, 1968)
M Levensen, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf, (CUP, 1991)
D Lodge, The Language of Fiction, (Routledge, 1966)
D Lucas, The Religious Dimension of Twentieth Century British and American Literature (University Press of America, Washington, 1982)
J Lucas, Arnold Bennett: A Study of His Fiction, (Methuen, 1974)
Hugh Macdougall, Racial Myth in English History (University Press of New England, 1982)
K May, Nietzsche and Modern Literature, (Macmillan, 1988)
L Menard, Discovering Modernism: T S Eliot and his Context (OUP, 1987)
J Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature 1890-1930, (Athlone, 1977)
K Millard, Edwardian Poetry, (OUP, 1991)
R C Murphin (ed), Conrad Revisited, (University of Alabama Press, 1985)
L Pykett, Engendering Fictions: the English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century, (Arnold, 1995)
R Ross, The Georgian Revolt: The Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910-1922 (Faber, 1975)
E Said, Orientalism, (Routledge, 1980)
(ed) R Samuel, Culture Ideology and Politics, (Routledge, 1983)
S Spender, Love Hate Relations, (Hamilton, 1974)
G K Stead, The New Poetic (Hutchinson, 1968, revised edition, 1987)
P Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920 (1979)
F Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (Heinemann, 1935)
W Y Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature 1880-1946 (Knopf, 1947)
J C Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre, (Blackwell, 1976)
A Trodd, Reader’s Guide to Edwardian Literature, (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)
M Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, (CUP, 1981)
P Widdowson, E M Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History (Methuen, 1978)
R Williams, Culture and Society 1880-1950, (Penguin, 1963)
R Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verso, 1980)
A. Wright, Literature of Crisis, (Macmillan, 1984)