• Home
• Study
• Study Information
• Modules
• Module Information

Sex, Scandal and Sensation in Victorian Literature

Module description

A survey of Victorian popular fiction focused on the 'sensation novel' and including earlier and later works that shocked contemporary readers, mainly through their frank engagements with sex and sexuality.

Module aims - intentions of the module

What literature caused a sensation among or even shocked Victorian readers, and how did they respond to it? Looking across a range of poetry and fiction from the period, this module engages directly with hotly-debated issues, such as the burgeoning market for cheap, unhealthy literature, the tensions among social classes, and the scandals relating to marriage, divorce, sexuality and prostitution. From tales of murder and incarceration, to fantasies of female vampirism, the Victorian literature of sex, scandal and sensation excited readers' imaginations as well as their passions. The core reading emphasises popular and genre fiction, but includes poetry and contextual documents as well.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

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

• 1. Demonstrate an advanced critical understanding of the literature and history of the Victorian period.
• 2. Demonstrate an advanced capacity to place literature (including popular and ephemeral works) in the context of social and cultural events (e.g., divorce, sexuality, prostitution).
• 3. Demonstrate an advanced ability to engage with concepts such as gender, sexuality, class, nation and empire.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

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

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse Victorian literature (1830s-1900s) and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context.
• 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history.
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts

ILO: Personal and key skills

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

• 7. Through presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups.
• 8. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 9. Through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis.
• 10. Through research, seminar discussion, and essay writing demonstrate an advanced capacity to question assumptions, to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to critically reflect on their own learning process.

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:

• Victorian Body Shocks:  Introduction to Scholarship and Key Idea
• Reading Real-Life Scandals: Extracts from Victorian Periodicals
• Dreadful Doings: Anon., The String of Pearls [Sweeney Todd] (1846-7)
• Fallen Women: Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853)
• Wages of Sin: Robert Browning, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836); Christina Rossetti, ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1862); Augusta Webster, A Castaway (1870); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Jenny’ (1870); Amy Levy, ‘Magdalen’ (1884)
• Sensation, Suspense, (In)Sanity: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-60)
• Opportunities Week - No seminars
• Bigamy, Violence and the Femme Fatale: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
• Science, Medicine, Madness: Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) 
• Erotomania: Anon., Teleny (1893)
• Sex and Circumstance: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
• Gothic Sexualities and the Empire: Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897)

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

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

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 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

(Texts not listed below are collected in a module reading pack.)

Primary texts:

• Anon., Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, ed. Robert Mack (Oxford, 2007)
• Anon., Teleny: Or, the Reverse of the Medal (Valancourt, 2010)
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford, 2012)
• Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter (Oxford, 2016)
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford, 2008)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (Oxford, 2008)
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford, 2008)
• Richard Marsh, The Beetle (Broadview, 2004)

Selected secondary texts:

• Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Ohio, 1957) 
• Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State, 1991) 
• Nicholas Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge, 2009) 
• Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Anthem, 2004) 
• Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2007) 
• Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• Exeter Learning Environment (e-learning platform)
• J-STOR
• Project Muse
• Nineteenth-Century British Library Newspapers
• Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals Online
• NINES

Key words search

Victorian, sensation, sex and scandal