Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- BBI-ANG22-225E.11
- Title
- Reading Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches: From Gibbon to Graves: History, Literature and Narrative in Modern British Cultural History
- Usual semester
- Both
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- Course Objectives •To Consider the role literary and historical narrative have played in the culture of Britain from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th century. •To Develop an understanding of the culture of the period wrote about its own past and received classical antiquity. •To Investigate the role that literature played in the British participation in modernity. •To expose students to the frameworks of Empire, Orientalism, Nationalism, Modernism, and narrativity through the history and literature of the British empire from 1750 to 1939. •To consider the role British literature and historical narrative played in a broader Atlantic and European and global contexts.
- Course content
- Course Description This undergraduate seminar course takes a thematic interdisciplinary approach to literature, history and narrative from the mid-eighteenth century to the interwar period (1750-1939). The course investigates the role of narrative in the historiographic. process. It explores the representation of cultural and social realities of early modern Britain for the “long nineteenth century”. This seminar also considers the transformative nature of this period and the emergence of the modern world. Yet, at the same that the modernity is emerging, attention to and representation of the distant past plays a critical role in the cultural paradigms of the period. The role of the distant past in narrativity in terms of classical reception and representation, and the role that classical engagement played in shaping social, cultural, and historical narratives of the nineteenth century. The course readings draw on the works of Suetonius, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Graves. In addition, the course introduces theoretical and historiographic works from Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, Edward Said Jürgen Osterhammel, and Erich Hobsbawm. Additional motifs in course will include the role classical reception played in the 19th century culture and society of the U.K. and the challenges of coping with the modernity of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Assessment method
- Course assignments will focus on participation in course discussion, short “response paper” and a final oral presentation on a topic of the student’s choice that relates to the course material.
- Bibliography
- Key Readings Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the War in France. (1790) Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution (1837) Dickens, Charles. ATale of Two Cities (1859) Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789) Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe (1819) Scott, Sir Walter. The Antiquary (1816) Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818) Stoker, Bram. Dracula (1897) Ford, Madox Ford. The Good Soldier (1915) Graves, Robert. I, Claudius (1934) Osterhammel, Jurgen. The Transformation of the World: AGlobal History of the Nineteenth Century (2014) Polodori, John Wiliam. The Vampyr (1818) Said, Edward. Orientalism (1978) Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (1818) Stoker, Bram. Dracula (1897) Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. (1764) White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) Wollstencraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects (1792) Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel (1937) Suetoneus. The Lives of the Caesars