Global Victorians: Making the Modern World, 1837-1914
| Module title | Global Victorians: Making the Modern World, 1837-1914 |
|---|---|
| Module code | EASM206 |
| Academic year | 2025/6 |
| Credits | 30 |
| Module staff | Professor Kate Hext (Convenor) |
| Duration: Term | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration: Weeks | 11 |
| Number students taking module (anticipated) | 20 |
|---|
Module description
The Victorian period defined the modern world as we know it. Between 1837 and 1914, Britain’s imperial ambitions and influence were at their height, shaping the development of globalized modernity in powerful, often violent and long-lasting ways. This module explores how the hopes and struggles that characterized Victorian culture were bound up with the ways the period thought about, and interacted with, other locales, peoples and cultures in the world. It will also introduce you to ways that other cultures and societies represented, revised and resisted Victorian forms of global influence across a range of fiction and non-fiction texts.
Module aims - intentions of the module
This course is structured by 11 weekly discussion-based seminars. Each week will focus on a core text or set of short texts, exploring these in relation to the Victorians in their global contexts, to provide an overview of literature, culture, and the history of ideas, in the period that begins with Queen Victoria’s reign and ends with the death of Edward V: 1837-1910.
We will put canonical and non-canonical prose and poetry by British writers in dialogue with the writing and histories of peoples and territories that were impacted by Victorian imperialism, to consider the emergence of popular fiction (e.g. adventure, horror, sensation, science fiction), the combined aesthetic and political motivations behind movements such as ‘New Women’ and the decadent movement, and their reach across territories. We will study how our focal works are linked to their contemporary social, political and artistic developments, including industrialisation and commodity culture, urbanisation, colonialism, environmental change and degradation, racial ideology, class relations, science and evolution, and gender and sexuality.
Through this module, students will be able to develop specialist interests in authors, themes, and ideas in the period. At the same time, students will become familiar with critical methodologies and paradigms – including affect theory, animal studies, eco-criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, thing theory, World-systems theory – to help shape discussion and research.
This content will facilitate the development of skills and experience for students to write and research academic and non-academic content in the twenty-first century. It will orient students to the University Library’s extensive nineteenth-century physical holdings as well as its digital archival resources. Writing workshops will introduce you to creative and translational approaches to Victorian-based research, in addition to helping you to develop more traditional academic writing skills. Its workshops and assessments will help you to develop research strategies in digital humanities and writing techniques beyond the traditional essay form, while also buttressing core skills in close-reading and academic writing.
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 global nineteenth-century studies, including familiarity with various literary styles and genres.
- 2. Demonstrate an advanced critical understanding of the dynamic relations between literature and the social, economic, political, scientific, and cultural debates of the Victorian period.
- 3. Demonstrate an advanced ability to research 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...
- 4. Illustrate the advanced ability to creatively articulate key debates and ideas of the period in an accessible style and form.
- 5. Demonstrate a sophisticated and intellectually mature ability to analyse different types of 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 your 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.
ILO: Personal and key skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 8. Demonstrate the ability to negotiate between academic research and accessible non-fictional or fictional prose.
- 9. Demonstrate the ability to construct a research-based essay of substantial length, detail, bibliographical skill, and originality.
- 10. Demonstrate an intellectually mature ability to reflect upon and strengthen written and other work in response to written and verbal feedback.
Syllabus plan
While the content may vary from year to year, the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:
Commodities and Material Culture
The American Civil War and the Cotton Famine
Gardening and Empire
Technology
Gender & Sexuality
Food systems
Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
Gender and Orientalism
Class and Heredity
Adventure and Empire
Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities | Guided independent study | Placement / study abroad |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | 275 | 0 |
Details of learning activities and teaching methods
| Category | Hours of study time | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 25 | 11 x seminar and 2 x workshops |
| Guided independent study | 175 | Reading, research, and essay preparation |
| Guided independent study | 100 | Seminar preparation |
Formative assessment
| Form of assessment | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitch | 250 words | 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, | Oral feedback in 1:1 meeting |
| Essay proposal | 250 words | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | Oral feedback in 1:1 meeting |
Summative assessment (% of credit)
| Coursework | Written exams | Practical exams |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 0 | 0 |
Details of summative assessment
| Form of assessment | % of credit | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creative Reflection or Archive Report | 30 | 2,000 words | 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 | Written feedback on cover sheet and optional office hour meeting |
| Essay | 70 | 4,500 words | 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 | Written feedback on cover sheet and optional office hour meeting |
Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)
| Original form of assessment | Form of re-assessment | ILOs re-assessed | Timescale for re-assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creative Reflection or Archive Report | Creative Reflection or Archive Report (30%) | 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 | Referral / deferral period |
| Essay | Essay (70%) | 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 | Referral / deferral period |
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
Primary
- Grant Allen, 'The Thames Valley Catastrophe' (1901)
- Mona Caird, 'Marriage' (1888)
- Charles Darwin, The Decent of Man (1871)
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
- Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic (British Library Publishing, 2019)
- M. M. Fuze, The Black People and Whence They Came. [c. 1900]
- Anthony Galton, 'Hereditary Improvement' (1873)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854-5)
- H. Rider Haggard, She (1887)
- Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897)
- Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857)
- The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine database - https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/
- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); ‘The Land Ironclads’ (1903)
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford World’s Classics, 2025)
- Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1880-1914 (Penguin, 2002)
Secondary
- Sukanya Banerjee, “Transimperial.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3–4, 2018, pp. 925–28.
- Simon Joyce, LGBT Victorians (OUP, 2022)
- Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Verso, 2017)
- Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994)
- Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
- Suzanne Daly, “Paisley/Kashmir: Mapping the Imitation-Indian Shawl,” Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Julie Codell and Linda Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
- Martin Hewitt, ed. The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012)
- Tara Puri, “Indian Objects, English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 22, 1 (2017), p. 1-23
- Simon Rennie, ‘This ‘Merikay War’: poetic responses in Lancashire to the American Civil War’ Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 126–143, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz024
- Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2008)
- Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave, 2009)
Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources
- ELE – https://ele.exeter.ac.uk/
- The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine database - https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/
| Credit value | 30 |
|---|---|
| Module ECTS | 15 |
| Module pre-requisites | None |
| Module co-requisites | None |
| NQF level (module) | 7 |
| Available as distance learning? | No |
| Origin date | 14/03/2025 |
