Desire and Decay: Literature of the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Reflect on your own position as a scholar in relation to these debates in the period, and today.
• Give an account of the practices which made—and continue to make—certain texts more widely available, more expensive, more intelligible, more dangerous, or more central to our understanding of the value of English literature
• Use this research and understanding to debate a variety of scholarly perspectives
• Understand and explain literary scholarship on the literature of this period.
• Draw on the knowledge and the critical tools needed to think about the concepts of authorship and literary value in the Restoration, Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian periods

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The proliferation of print and the professionalisation of literature
• How the idea of an English Literary tradition has been constructed in and through this period
• English literary texts, authors, and genres between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Think and write with clarity and conviction

The module is structured around a series of thematic case studies drawn from the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each case study is anchored in a key Restoration, Enlightenment, Romantic, or Victorian text and examines how literary works negotiate the tensions between desire and decay, and anxieties about moral, cultural, or aesthetic decline. Across the module, you will explore how changing ideas of authorship, readership, genre, and literary value developed alongside transformations in print culture, education, gender relations, and intellectual life. Case studies will address topics such as romance and realism, sensibility and excess, innovation and imitation, and the afterlives of texts over time. The syllabus will vary from year to year, allowing teaching staff to respond to new critical approaches while maintaining a sustained focus on the literary, cultural, and material conditions that shaped literature from the Restoration to the Victorian period. Module texts may include works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Eliza Haywood; Daniel Defoe; Sarah Fielding; Helen Maria Williams; William Wordsworth; Jane Austen; Lewis Carroll; Christina Rossetti; George Meredith; Wilkie Collins; Arthur Conan Doyle; and Oscar Wilde. Texts are selected to reflect the thematic concerns of the module and to offer a range of genres, forms, and historical contexts across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Teaching methods include - lectures - seminars - individual consultations - feedback on written work and seminar presentations Learning activities include - reading assigned texts - independent research - seminar discussion and presentations - writing essays This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible contact hour, 5 in total, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; one-to-one assignment consultations; one-to-one feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Formative

This is how we’ll give you feedback as you are learning. It is not a formal test or exam.

Draft piece

• Assessment Type: Formative
• Feedback:
• Final Assessment:
• Group Work: No

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.