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Making Progress? Literature in a Changing Environment

Module description

The perception of history as one of continual progress, enlightenment and improvement was one of the most powerful narratives of the nineteenth century. The myth of progress underpinned a wide variety of changes in the Victorian period, including, among others, the economic conditions of commercial growth; the Woman Question; financial prosperity and surplus goods; the global conditions of imperial expansion; the technological developments of industrial production; and the theory of evolution. Making Progress explores the contrasting ways in which Victorian writers defined and responded to this narrative of progress and to a culture that was changing spectacularly around them.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Making Progress aims to consider the ways in which Victorian writers defined and responded to a culture that was changing spectacularly around them. It will focus on key issues: the reconceptualisation of history and relations with the past, the new understanding of nature, adjustments in gender and class relations, the changing nature of literary forms, the rise of industrial society and its new politics, alterations in knowledge and belief systems (especially those relating to science and religion), and the emergence of London as a global metropolis. It will study selected poetry and prose in relation to evolving debates in these areas. Seminars will discuss key texts alongside literary and non-literary contextual sources.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an advanced knowledge and understanding of key social, intellectual, and ideological issues in nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies, and familiarity with various literary styles and genres
• 2. Demonstrate an advanced critical understanding of intimate relations between aesthetics and the social, economic, political, scientific, and cultural debates of the Victorian period
• 3. Demonstrate an advanced capacity to analyse contemporary critical debates in the field of Victorian Studies
• 4. Demonstrate an advanced knowledge of researching a variety of literary and other media from the nineteenth-century using physical and electronic resources

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Demonstrate a sophisticated and intellectually mature ability to analyse Victorian literature and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced and autonomous ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history
• 7. Demonstrate an advanced ability to digest, select, and organise interdisciplinary material and to trace the development of debate across disciplinary boundaries
• 8. Demonstrate an ability to devise, research, and execute a programme of archival research

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 9. Through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups
• 10. Through essay-writing, demonstrate advanced research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and to write clear and correct prose
• 11. Research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis
• 12. Through the writing of an extended essay and research report, demonstrate an ability to construct work of substantial length, detail, and some originality
• 13. Through responses to constructive feedback, demonstrate an advanced and intellectually mature ability to reflect upon and strengthen written and other work

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics: 

• Visions of Progress
• Place, Progress and Provincial Life
• Global Victorians
• Dis-united nations?
• Poetry and Modern Life
• Information Revolutions: Print Media and Periodicals
• Sensations and Stimuli
• Bodies of Knowledge
• The Terror(ism) of History
• Medievalism and the Moment
• Ghosts of Christmas Present

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 50%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of referral will be capped at 50%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

• George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 2003))
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics, 2003)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Oxford UP, 2008)
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford World’s Classics, 2012)

Secondary Reading:

• Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glasswords: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880 (OUP, 2008)
• Martin Hewitt, ed. The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012)
• Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave, 2009)
• John Plunkett, Paul Young, Angelique Richardson, Regenia Gagnier, Rick Rylance and Ana Parejo Vadillo, eds. Victorian Literature: A Sourcebook, (Palgrave, 2012)
• Juliet John, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, The English Novel in History 1840-1895 (Routledge 1997)
• Rohan McWilliam and Kelly Boyd, ed. The Victorian Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007)
• John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (OUP 2003)
• Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890 (OUP, 1998)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=688

Key words search

Victorian, progress, globabisation, the city, industrial revolution, modernity, emotions, realism