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Sex, Scandal and Sensation in Victorian Literature

Module description

You will study a range of popular literature that shocked contemporary readers, exploring relevant genres and historical contexts. You will read ‘penny dreadfuls’, ‘sensation’ novels, social-problem novels, poems about prostitution and an example of nineteenth-century pornography, and you will engage directly with ephemeral nineteenth-century sources using Exeter’s extensive array of digitized materials.

Module aims - intentions of the module

• To enable you to situate these texts within their historical context and to facilitate your consideration of the intersections between politics and aesthetics.
• To encourage you to consider the intersection of nineteenth-century literature with newspapers and other resources from the period.
• To motivate you to relate your readings of these texts to various political and scientific debates that were circulating from the 1840s to the turn of the century.

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 Victorian popular literature in the context of social and cultural events (e.g., divorce, sexuality, prostitution).

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

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

• 3. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse literature and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context.
• 4. 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.

ILO: Personal and key skills

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

• 5. Through essay-writing and bibliography compilation, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 6. Through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis.

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
• Reading Real-Life Scandals in Periodicals
• Penny Dreadful
• Fallen Women
• Prostitution
• Sensation, Suspense, Body-Doubles
• Bigamy, Violence and the Femme Fatale
• Science, Medicine, Madness
• Sexology and Pornography
• The Horrors of Marriage
• Gothic and Imperial Sexualities

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 available on ELE.)
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, (Cambridge, 1980) Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

ELE – College to provide hyperlink to appropriate pages

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, Sex, Scandal, Sensation, Nineteenth Century, Novel