Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- BBI-ANG17-312E.30
- Title
- Elective seminar in English literature - The Victorian Era through the Lens of The French Lieutenant’s Woman
- Usual semester
- Autumn
- ECTS
- 5
- Language
- Learning outcomes
- The aim of this course is to present the culture of the Victorian Era through the close reading and literary analysis of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), with special regard to Fowles’ great 19th-century novelistic predecessors, Romantic and Victorian poetry, and the history of ideas in 19th-century Europe.
- Course content
- The epigraphs of the novel central to the course evoke a wide range of 19th-century literature and scholarship, from Tennyson’s elegiac poetry to Marx’s social criticism to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The course seeks to balance fiction and critical literature, thus expanding the research toolkit of the senior students who are expected to start the process of writing a thesis this term.
- Assessment method
- Weekly instalments of reading and preparation; in-class presentation; end-term test; home paper.
- Bibliography
- Primary literature Arnold, Matthew. “A Farewell” (1853) and other poems. Austen, Jane. Persuasion (1817). Barnes, William. Poems in the Dorset Dialect (1869). Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Clough, A. H. Selected poetry. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species (1859). Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Signet, 1970. Hardy, Thomas. Selected poetry. Lord Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam (1850) and other poems. Marx, Karl. Communist Manifesto (1867). Stephen, Leslie. Sketches from Cambridge (1865). Secondary literature Alber, Jan. “Absurd Catalogues: The Function of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction.” Style 50.3 (2016): 342–358. Levin, Yael. “Metalepsis and the Author Figure in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction.” Twentieth Century Literature 62.3 (September 2016): 289–308. Mandal, Mahitosh. “‘Eyes a man could drown in’: Phallic Myth and Femininity in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 19.3 (2017): 274–298. Marais, Mark. “‘I am infinitely strange to myself’: Existentialism, the Bildungsroman, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Journal of Narrative Theory 44.2 (Summer 2014): 244–266.