Our most familiar ideas about authorship are bound up with concepts of individuality and selfhood, but what is the self, and why do we attach so much importance to it? This module offers an introduction to key ideas about selfhood and subjectivity in literature, focusing particularly on Romantic and Victorian explorations of, and experiments with, constructing the self. The Romantic period saw a new focus upon selfhood, within a revolutionary political and intellectual context where established truths and allotted identities were being challenged. The nature of the artist, especially the poet, was of especial concern: what was a ‘poet’, and who was that singular ‘I’ in the text? And how did a poet’s gender inflect popular notions of his or her literary authority? In the Victorian period the so-called ‘Woman Question’ led writers of both genres to interrogate female subjectivity and to speculate on whether selfhood itself was gendered. In order to explore the many facets of this rich topic, the module will examine texts from a range of literary genres, including poetry, the novel, autobiography, biography, the short story, journals and letters, non-fictional prose and pastiche, alongside critical and theoretical works, concluding with a discussion of Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘death of the author’.

show an informed knowledge of the characteristics of a range of Romantic and Victorian literature; discuss the various methods, strategies, and genres used by authors of the period to construct the self; demonstrate enhanced skills of close textual analysis; be able to relate their own critical readings of literary works to those of published critics; use aspects of critical theory in their own essay writing.

Two one-hour lectures, and one one-hour seminar weekly. In the lectures students will be given handouts, and PowerPoint presentations will be used where appropriate. These will be made available to students on Learning Central directly after the session. During the seminars students may occasionally be asked to give presentations, and each week there will be the opportunity for small-group discussion and close analysis of the text.

The seminars will be used to hone students’ skills of textual analysis and to afford them opportunities to practise presentation and oral discussion skills. Students will also be given the opportunity to write formative, unassessed essays and close readings of texts. This, together with the work done for the assessed essay and exam, will enhance students’ subject-specific knowledge of literary and cultural history. The written and oral practice will enhance students’ awareness of register and will help to improve skills in critical thinking and building an argument. Employability skills include the ability to synthesise information, operating in group-based discussion, debating ideas and producing informed arguments in a clear, precise and professional manner.

An essay (60%) and an exam (40%). The essay topics will include a creative writing option. The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide; there are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

Type of assessment

% 

Title

Duration (exam) / Word length (essay)

Approximate date of assessment

Essay

60

2,000 words

May

Formal examination

40

1.5 hours

May/June

THE POTENTIAL FOR REASSESSMENT IN THIS MODULE:

In common with University regulations, students are allowed two attempts at retrieval of any failed essay or exam, for a maximum module mark of 40%.  Resit assessments are held over the summer.

Week 1: ‘Authoring the self’: autobiography, fiction, selfhood – concepts and theories (MW)

Week 2: ‘Writing the private self’ - journals and letters of C18-C19 women e.g. Frances Burney’s  Journals and Letters, and Hester Thrale Piozzi's Thraliana (SC)

Week 3: ‘Making a Poet’: Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and extracts from The Prelude (JC)

Week 4: ‘Making a Woman Poet’: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (JM)

Week 5: ‘Writing a fictional self’: The Female Bildungsroman - Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (AH)

Week 6: The Female Bildungsroman II: Jane Eyre (AH)

Week 7: ‘Writing a fictional self’: The Male Bildungsroman - Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (HF)

Week 8: The Male Bildungsroman: David Copperfield (HF)

Week 9: ‘Writing the private self’ II: Thoreau’s Walden and the Journal (NB)

Week 10: ‘The death (and return?) of the author’, Roland Barthes’ essay and its influence on literary criticism (AT)

Week 11: Conclusion: advice on the exam and essay

Week 1

Heehs, Peter, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

Moore, Jane and John Strachan, Key concepts in romantic literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Porter, Roy, Rewriting the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present (London; New York: Routledge,1997)

Saunders, Max, Self impression: life-writing, autobiografiction, and the forms of modern literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Taylor, Charles, Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989)

Treadwell, James, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1793-1834 (Oxford: OUP, 2005)

Week 2

Batchelor, Jennie and Cora Kaplan, British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Cook, Daniel and Amy Culley, Women’s life writing, 1700-1850: gender, genre and authorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Doody, Margaret, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)

Week 3

Faflak, Joel, Romantic psychoanalysis: the burden of the mystery (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2008)

Gill, Stephen, William Wordsworth's The Prelude: a casebook (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964; repr. 1975)

Jacobus, Mary, Romanticism, writing and sexual difference : essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1989)

Week 4

Cox, Philip, Gender, Genre, and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)

Ross, Marlon, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Weeks 5 & 6

Levine, George Lewis, ‘Jane, David and the Bildungsroman’, Chapter 4 in How to read the Victorian novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)

Plasa, Carl, Charlotte Brontë (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Weeks 7 & 8

Dunn, Richard, Routledge literary sourcebook on Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (New York: Routledge, 2004)

Furneaux, Holly, Queer Dickens: erotics, families, masculinities (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Three problems of fictional form: first-person narration in David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn’ in Experience in the novel: selected papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce, (New York: Columbia University Press,1968)

Week 9

Myerson, Joel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Roorda, Randall, Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998)

Week 10

Barthes, Roland, ‘The death of the author’ in David Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and theory, (London: Longman, 1988) pp. 166-172. [Also available elsewhere]

Burke, Sean, The death and return of the author: criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1998)