Victorian Literature | Semester I:

Today, we’re talking university. As with my undergrad studies (first year, second year, third year I & II), I wanted to discuss my modules with you. I love hearing what other people study and I love talking about what I study.

So, my first semester as a Masters student has drawn to a close. It’s been stressful. I’ve cried more times in the last two and half months than I did at undergrad for three years. It’s been a hard transition (I’ll definitely write a post about this at some point). Despite having a breakdown nearly every week, I’ve actually really enjoyed my studies. I’ve learnt so much about my favourite period. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

(I also studied a module called Research Skills but that’s pretty self-explanatory, very boring and was a core module that I had to do).

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Romantic Victorians

I was really looking forward to this module as it combined two of my favourite things: Romantic poets and Victorian writers. You may ask ‘why are you studying the Romantics on a Victorian module?’ Well that’s because they were deeply embedded in nineteenth-century culture. They are always referenced to or quoted from.

The aim of this module was to critically reflect on periodisation, and think about how Romantic characteristics (genre, themes, etc.) were re-developed in the Victorian period. My module handbook puts it nicely: the module aims to give you a sense of the immediate heritage of Victorian writers, and their indebtedness to Romantic writers.

I studied the likes of Wordsworth, Ruskin, Keats, Shelley and Browning

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Society and Sympathy: Victorian Realism

In a nutshell: a study of Victorian realism. I looked at the development of the genre alongside the emergence of the novel. I tried to define the genre (which is not as easy as you’d think), and considered the moral and social aims of the genre. We looked at the social novel, novels concerned with marriage and relationships, and others that speak of the church.

I’m surprised by how much I liked this module. Realism has always been something I’ve read, but never really thought about. It’s a hard genre to define: it cannot be truly real if it is fiction. I learnt quite a lot on this module, and I really enjoyed the books we looked at.

I studied the likes of Gaskell’s North & South and Mary Barton, Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and George Eliot’s Middlemarch

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Victorian Fears, Fantasies and Fairy-Tales

I wasn’t looking forward to this module at all. The Gothic, which was only a small section of this module, is something I find really hard to write about (I studied Victorian Gothic in my third year of undergrad). I don’t enjoy children’s literature (so that’s fairy-tales out of the window), and I assumed fantasies would be another writing issue.

I was wrong, though. This was quite an enjoyable module. I studied a range of texts that sit outside of the traditional nineteenth-century realist fiction. I considered how these texts deviated from the dominant genre by looking at sensation fiction, utopia and dystopia, ghost stories, fantasies and children’s fairy-tales.

I studied the likes of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis’s The Monk, Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, Collins’ The Woman in White, Jefferies’ After London, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Marsh’s The Beetle and Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’

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…and those were my semester one modules. I’m quite sad that it’s over. I loved studying these modules, and they went by *so* fast (I think because my classes alternated each week: one week I’d have S&S and F,F&FTs and then the next I’d have RV). Nevertheless, I’m eager to see what next semester has in store…

Do you study anything? Are you enjoying it? Let’s discuss it in the comments below!

Thanks for reading, Lauren X

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