Study information

Hardy and Women Who Did: the Coming of Modernity

Module titleHardy and Women Who Did: the Coming of Modernity
Module codeEAS3100
Academic year2024/5
Credits30
Module staff

Professor Angelique Richardson (Convenor)

Duration: Term123
Duration: Weeks

11

Number students taking module (anticipated)

15

Module description

The module explores the relationship of the late Victorians to modernity, revisiting a time of dynamic social transformation, new uses and misuses of science and technology, and heightened self-consciousness. On both sides of the Atlantic new ideas and uncertainties were emerging. Through decolonial and intersectional approaches we will address the following questions and more, many of which were posed at the time. What constituted the nature of woman? What was the relationship of women to men, to education, labour and citizenship? What were the causes of poverty? And what role might fiction have to play in disseminating new ideas? 

We will work with novels, short stories, poems, letters, including the newly launched Phase One of the Thomas Hardy’s Global Correspondents project housed at Exeter http://hardycorrespondents.exeter.ac.uk/index.html, illustrations and other material from the Victorian periodical press, including satirical cartoons, drawing on material from Special Collections. We will consider issues of class, urbanisation and sexual identity, imperialism, fears of racial degeneration and the intersection of debates on gender with imperial discourses. We will also consider ways in which new ideas about human-animal relations entered fiction, and look at Hardy's engagement with environmental issues. Through the exploration of new literary forms, and the rise of the short story, we will ask how important biography and autobiography are to our reading of literary texts, and explore late-Victorian views as to the social value and function of fiction. Students will also have the the opportunity to engage actively and productively with the digital world, for example by drawing on the Thomas Hardy’s Global Correspondents project (which will form part of assessment 2), offering comments or suggesting annotations to the letters and evaluating, improving or writing Wikipedia entries (see https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2018/05/wikipedia-in-the-history-classroom/).

Authors covered include Hardy, George Gissing and George Moore and bestselling New Woman writers Sarah Grand (who visited Hardy) Mona Caird (who was friends with Hardy), George Egerton (who corresponded with Hardy) Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin. We will also look at writing by Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin and Margaret Oliphant.

Module aims - intentions of the module

  • Exploring the relationship of the late Victorians to modernity, the module aims to recreate the time in which New Women, Thomas Hardy and other men such as George Gissing and George Moore, were writing – a moment of dynamic social transformation and heightened self-consciousness. Popular perceptions of Hardy continue to privilege pastoral myth, landscape and country houses above his more radical insights into class politics, imperialism, marriage and the oppression of women which took him into debates on the Woman question and nationalism (which he opposed).  New uncertainties were emerging. What constituted the nature of woman? What difference did class make? What was the relationship of women to men, to education, labour and citizenship? Bestselling New Woman writers such Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin sought new self-definition, envisioned alternative social arrangements to the family, and debated the nature of femininity, engaging, like Hardy, and the popular and prolific Grant Allen, author of the notorious The Woman Who Did (1895) with Darwinian and other scientific ideas.

 

  • Working with novels, short stories, poems, letters, illustrations and other material from contemporary periodicals, including satirical cartoons, we consider issues of class, urbanisation and sexual identity, fears of racial degeneration and the intersection of feminism with imperial discourses.

 

  • To explore the emergence of new literary forms, in particular the rise of the short story, and ask how important biography and autobiography are to our reading of literary texts.

 

  • To explore contemporary views as to the social function of fiction. A reading pack containing contemporary material from, for example, the periodical press will be provided at the beginning of the module.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

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

  • 1. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of specific authors and texts from the late nineteenth century
  • 2. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of the literary, social, political and cultural history of the late nineteenth century and; enter into related relevant scholarly conversations
  • 3. Compare and contrast primary texts by Hardy, Gissing, Moore and New Woman writers, making connections between different texts across the module

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

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

  • 4. Demonstrate a capacity to make detailed connections between late-nineteenth-century literature and the social, economic and political issues of the period
  • 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse the literature of an earlier era and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context
  • 6. 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
  • 7. 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...

  • 8. Demonstrate through module participation and assignments advanced communication skills, and an ability to work independently
  • 9. Demonstrate through module participation and assignments appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated evidence-based argument, and a capacity to write clearly and accurately and correct prose
  • 10. Demonstrate through module participation and assignments appropriate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis

Syllabus plan

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

Sources for material – WWD = Women Who Did; material either on basic reading list or from module reading pack (available via ELE) Unless italicised, texts refer to short stories, poems, or late nineteenth-century journalism.

The syllabus will move through weekly discussion of themes pertinent to the late Victorians and often resonant today.

We will begin by considering pervasive as well as resistant concepts of gender, looking at John Ruskin’s two essays on masculinity and femininity, Sesame and Lilies (1865), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) and Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868). We will also explore ways in which the periodical press contributed to constructions of gender. We will examine ways in which later nineteenth-century debates (including but by no means limited to gender) became informed by new scientific ideas, focusing on Darwin, and selected poems Hardy poems (poems you may wish to read include ‘The Ivy-Wife’, ‘In a Wood’, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘Proud Songsters’, ‘The Pine Planters’, as well as A. Mary F. Robinson’s ‘Darwinism’). We will draw on Phase One of the Hardy’s Global Correspondents Project.

As we consider the proliferation of new literary forms we will look in particular at the short story (you may wish to read the following stories: Caird’s ‘The Yellow Drawing Room’ (1892); Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ of the same year, Sarah Grand’s ‘The Undefinable’ (1894); Hardy’s ‘The History of an Hour’ (from Complete Poems), and the poems by Constance Naden, 'Scientific Wooing', A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘The Sonnet’ (1893) and Constance Naden, ‘The Two Artists’ (1894), as well as at Hardy’s periodical articles  on fiction. Our discussion of marriage will range from Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) to Hardy’s poem’s ‘The Orphaned Old Maid’ and ‘A Question of Marriage’, Mona Caird’s 1888 Westminster Review article ‘Marriage', Grant Allen’s Woman Who Did (1895) and George Egerton’s ‘Virgin Soil’ (1894).

Class as discourse and material reality is central to the module, for example in  Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), 'The Ruined Maid' and 'The Dorsetshire Labourer' (1883) as well as George Gissing, ‘A Daughter of the Lodge’ (1901). An intersectional treatment of class and gender can be found in e.g. Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and ‘We Field-women’, Constance Naden’s ‘Changed’ and ‘The Lady Doctor’, Gertrude Colmore’s ‘The Woman in the Corner’ (1913) and May Kendall’s ‘Woman's Future’ (1887).

The aesthetic concept of decadence and its supposedly scientific correlate degeneration were taken up in fiction, e.g. Egerton, ‘A Cross Line’ (1893), Menie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895) and Hardy’s short poem ‘A Practical Woman’ as well as in the mainstream and satirical periodical press, e.g. ‘She-Notes’ by ‘Borgia Smudgiton’ (Owen Seaman, editor of Punch).

Texts foregrounding place and location include Hardy’s London novel The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), and for  women in urban spaces see Alice Meynell’s ‘A Woman in Grey’ (1896), Kate Chopin’s ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings’ (1897), Hardy’s ‘Dream of the City Shopwoman’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ (1908).

Hardy’s 'The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid', 'A Mere Interlude', and the poems 'The West-of-Wessex Girl' and 'In a Museum’ provide depictions of Victorian and early twentieth-century Devon.

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

Scheduled Learning and Teaching ActivitiesGuided independent studyPlacement / study abroad
32.25267.750

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

CategoryHours of study timeDescription
Scheduled learning and teaching32.25Weekly two-hour seminar, weekly one-hour workshop or lecture, and 15 minute one-to-one feedback meeting in week 11
Guided independent study33Study group preparation and meetings
Guided independent study70Seminar preparation (individual)
Guided independent study164.75Reading, research and essay preparation

Summative assessment (% of credit)

CourseworkWritten examsPractical exams
10000

Details of summative assessment

Form of assessment% of creditSize of the assessment (eg length / duration)ILOs assessedFeedback method
Essay302500 words1-7, 9-10Written feedback with opportunity for follow up
Letter – engaging with a letter from the Hardy’s Correspondents project 15500 words1-7, 9-10Written feedback with opportunity for follow up
Video essay (7 mins), or blog post(s) up to 1500 words or 3000 word essay 457 mins (video essay) 1500 words (blog) 3500 words (essay)1-7, 9-10Written feedback with opportunity for follow up
Module participation10Ongoing1-8,10Oral
0
0

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

Original form of assessmentForm of re-assessmentILOs re-assessedTimescale for re-assessment
EssayEssay1-7, 9-10Referral/Deferral period
LetterLetter1-7, 9-10Referral/Deferral period
VIdeo essayVideo Essay1-7, 9-10Referral/Deferral period
Module participationRepeat study/mitigation1-8,10N/a

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

Basic reading:

Please use scholarly editions of the Hardy novels where possible (OUP, Penguin, Broadview Press). If you want to use online library versions rather than own your own copies I have indicated in square brackets electronic copies available via the university library; you can also find various editions these texts on archive.org.  They are also available via https://www.gutenberg.org/.

Other texts and selected poems are available in a module pack via ELE

Selected secondary texts (further reading will be recommended via ELE):

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

ELE – A selection of primary and contextual readings will be made available on ELE.

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

Key words search

English, literature, empire, imperialism, decolonising, intersectionality, culture, novels, short stories, poetry, Victorian, Hardy, women, masculinities, femininities, modernity, place, class, urbanisation

Credit value30
Module ECTS

15

Module pre-requisites

None

Module co-requisites

None

NQF level (module)

6

Available as distance learning?

No

Origin date

01/10/2011

Last revision date

25/04/2022