MA in 19th Century Studies

MAs in

19^th CENTURY STUDIES

Minature of a Victorian Lady

The MAs in Nineteenth-Century Studies are centred in the School of English but take place in collaboration with the Department of History, the Department of Germanic Studies and other academic departments, and under the aegis of the Centre for 19th-Century Studies. The Centre and the MAs draw together scholars from a range of disciplines across the University and aim to promote truly interdisciplinary research.

Our interests extend across the entire breadth of the ‘long nineteenth century’, from around 1789 to about 1914, encompassing the Romantic and Victorian eras, and the beginnings of modernism. The Centre holds regular seminars and conferences, and provides a forum for its numerous graduate students. The work of the Centre is not confined to the University, but extends outwards to the city, drawing on its wealth of nineteenth-century resources. We have established strong links with the City Archives, the Ruskin Gallery, the Mappin Art Gallery, and Weston Park Museum, drawing on their materials for both research and MA teaching. The University of Sheffield library also has excellent holdings in nineteenth-century primary materials, including complete runs of all the major periodicals.

The MA is designed for students with a background in English Literature or History, or other subjects offering relevant period training. It aims to introduce students who might come from a narrow disciplinary base to methodologies and concerns of other related fields of study in the larger frame of nineteenth-century scholarship. We offer two distinct tracks through the MA. The Research Track version is designed explicitly for students who wish to develop their knowledge and research-based skills before embarking on advanced independent research up to doctoral level. It offers slightly less period coverage, and greater emphasis on the acquisition of advanced research skills than the non-Research track MA which is designed for students who wish to extend the range and depth of their understanding of the period.

Students on the MA take a core module, which introduces them to interdisciplinary research (30 credits). They then take approved modules totalling 90 credits (normally three modules), and write a 15,000-word dissertation on a subject of their own choosing (60 credits). Students on the research-track MA take the core module on interdisciplinary research, a second core module on Research Practice (30 credits), and two approved modules (60 credits), and they write a 15,000-word dissertation. The MAs can be taken full time, over twelve months, or part-time over twenty-four months.

The modules we run change each year, but most items in the list below will be available in the year to come. If you have queries, please contact the Course Director.

LIT6390 Core Module: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Nineteenth Century Studies (Dr Matthew Campbell and Others)

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness’. Dickens was ruefully appreciative of his age’s superlative contradictions, and this course aims to develop an understanding of such vibrant variety by drawing on a range of interdisciplinary research techniques to consider four revolutions of ‘the times’: French, industrial, intellectual and gender. The course may also involve sessions at the City Archives, and the Mappin and Ruskin Galleries; authors studied will include Gaskell, Dickens, Tennyson, Ruskin, Kipling, and other literary and visual artists in England and Europe; topics discussed will include political satire, Darwinism, prophecy and progress, imperialism, and men dressing up as women.

This module is taken by Research Track MA students and involves a fortnightly 1.5 hour seminar over the course of both autumn and spring semesters. It is about developing a sound grasp of the research methods you will need to employ when undertaking your own research, both for your dissertation and when you commence a PhD. You will work with microfilm and electronic material, practice creating viable methodological approaches to research topics and develop archival skills. You will be asked to manage a series of research-based topics which, as well as being the method of assessment, will provide the basis for ongoing seminar discussion.

GER6230: Nineteenth Century German Literature (Professor Michael Perraudin, German)

This module introduces students to major texts and cultural movements in Germany from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, from Goethe’s Faust to Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. Other authors studied are expected to include E.T.A. Hoffmann (The Golden Pot), Joseph von Eichendorff (Memoirs of a Good-For-Nothing), Heinrich Heine (English Fragments and Germany. A Winter’s Tale), Georg Büchner (Woyzeck and Dantons Death), Theodor Storm (Immensee or Aquis submersus), Theodor Fontane (Effi Briest). The course will combine close reading with investigation of the intellectual-historical and socio-political environments which the texts reflect. After an initial survey introduction to the topic, the works will be studied in chronological order, with a final session to examine the developments the course has revealed.

This course will examine the theory and practice of the representation of reality in the fiction of the middle years of the Nineteenth Century (1848-1859). We will consider why and how writers such as Disraeli, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell, Thackeray and George Eliot strive to represent historical, social and sensuous aspects of their world, examining the various conceptions of truth, reality and representation embodied in their fiction. This consideration will be informed be readings of non-fictional texts by writers such as Mayhew and Ruskin, and by accounts of the dynamics of representational art proposed by twentieth century literary theory and aesthetics.

This module examines Scottish poetry written during the eighteenth century. Following the Union of Parliaments in 1707, Scottish verse was subject to a number of pressures: patriotic, economic, political, cultural and linguistic. The module examines how poets of this period, including Ramsay, Macpherson, Fergusson, Burns, Little and others, responded to those pressures. The module will read the creation of verse alongside the emergence of a vibrant print culture in Scotland. The emphasis is upon understanding the material conditions amidst and by which poetry is created, marketed and received.

CEC6004 Folklore in Literature and Popular Culture (Dr Malcolm Jones, National Centre for English Cultural Tradition)

This module will concentrate on exploring the tradition of exploiting the folkloric in (mainly) English literature, from the sermon anecdotes and fabliaux of the Middle Ages, through the popular drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (e.g. Peele’s Old Wives Tale), to the use of such material made by nineteenth-century novelists such as Hardy. There will be a particular emphasis on the still little-studied parodic genres, such as burlesque sermons and mock-testaments, and the nonsense-writers, but neither will the mummers’ play or such para-drama as the caperings of the hobby-horse be forgotten, nor more recent ‘oral literature’ such as the popular contemporary legend.

This course will focus on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), one of the greatest and most influential works of nineteenth century philosophy. We will study the entire text, in an attempt to uncover the nature of Hegel’s methods; his goals; and the rôle and significance of the Phenomenology in Hegel’s system. As the Phenomenology covers an enormous range, this will lead to a discussion of Hegel’s epistemology and metaphysics, of his philosophy of history, ethics and political philosophy, and of his critiques of Kant, Schelling, Rousseau and others. There will be an emphasis on a close reading of the text, and a sympathetic engagement with Hegel’s notoriously difficult but stimulating ideas.

The Rise of the Gothic will examine the transmutations of the Gothic genre in Britain between 1790 and 1900. In the late eighteenth century the Gothic emerged as a powerful discourse well-suited to the tempestuous politics of the time, in such diverse and ‘non-literary fields’ as aesthetics, political theory and polemic, and science. We will chart the rise of the Gothic in Britain through considering these ‘non-literary’ areas beside the ‘literary’ Gothic. We will trace the genre’s influence through its early use of terror, to its changing emphasis on vampire and sensation fiction towards the close of the nineteenth century. You will emerge from the course with an understanding of the Gothic genre in relation to contemporary and often conflicting discourses of the time.

The course is designed to facilitate understanding in the use of archival and other primary materials that are utilised in the process o research. The three main objectives are: to provide the students with a greater awareness of the link between original source material and academic research; to allow them to utilise this material first-hand with reference to the national Fairground Archive and to consider the methodology behind the cataloguing of the Tynan and Ramsey Collections at the British Library; to enable greater access to the range of materials that can be utilised for primary resources.

'Romantic Ireland' was pronounced dead and gone by WB Yeats in 1913. This module will look at its literary history through the long nineteenth-century, as a concept and as the subject of writing, but also as a location with a distinctive culture. It will discuss a variety of genres - poem, ballad, romance, gothic novel, melodrama - by a variety of writers including Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Lady Morgan, James Clarence Mangan, Anthony Trollope, Dion Boucicault and Yeats. It will also introduce students to the historical contexts of nineteenth-century Irish writing, and explore its related musical and visual culture.

The range of topics embraced by the term Folklore (as currently understood) will be systematically surveyed by way of the six genres identified by North American scholars: childlore (nursery rhymes, nicknames, etc), language (dialect, proverbs, riddles, blason populaire, etc), custom and belief (eg superstition, traditional ‘foodways’), folktale and legend (including the modern ‘urban legends’), folk music and dance, and material culture (traditional crafts, vernacular architecture etc). The evidence of the historical record will be fully exploited in the interests of providing chronological depth, but it will also be stressed that there is as much folklore in the 21st century as at any time previously.

HST 6003: The Fin-de-Siècle (30 credits) (Dr Timothy Baycroft, History / Dr Richard Canning, English)

Given the relatively recent turn of the millenium, the last few years have seen a huge wave of scholarly attention focusing on notions of the fin-de-siècle, and the end of what was then the previous century - the nineteenth century - in particular. The object of this course is to gain an understanding of the phenomenon of the fin-de-siècle in Europe, and its cultural and literary manifestations, through an analysis of a variety of sources, including novels, poetry, theatre, science and scientific writing, art, architecture, private correspondence, non-fictional prose and criticism - all dating between 1880 and 1910. This interdisciplinary course will draw upon the methodologies of both History and Literature while reflecting upon these sources. This was a period of great instability in respect of norms of conduct and comprehension in respect of gender, sexuality, psychology, class, nationhood and race – responses to such concerns will feature heavily in the chosen literature. In literary terms, the period marks a period of stark transition, and the beginnings of modernism. Students will present individual texts or topics in the weekly two-hour seminars, and collaborate in one session comparing fin-de-siècle consciousness in the most dynamic European cities of the time, such as London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow or Barcelona.

RUS365-6 The Russian Novel in the Nineteenth Century (Professor David Shepherd, Russian)

The unit traces the development of the nineteenth-century Russian novel from the shorter prose fiction of Pushkin and Gogol, through the formal experimentation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time and Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which the limits of the genre were confronted and tested, to the culmination of the form in the works of those most commonly regarded as its greatest Russian practitioners - Turgenev, Dostoevski and Tolstoi.

This module examines the politics and aesthetics of medievalism in the nineteenth century. It will look at fiction, poetry, art, architecture, art criticism and social commentary by artists and thinkers as disparate as Thomas Carlyle and William Morris. The module will ask what the Middle Ages signified to these writers, and what ends invocation of the medieval served. Readings of texts and art objects will emphasise contrasting notions of medievalism, either as a 'Dream of Order' or an imagined escape from settled social structures. By considering a range of medievalist agendas – Radical Toryism, socialism, paternalism and anarchism – this module highlights the changing and politically unstable nature of a key Victorian preoccupation.

LIT6024 Urban Dreams and Nightmares: the City in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Dr Samantha Matthews)

Shelley’s vision of nineteenth-century London - metropolis, capital of empire and first world city - as a hellish ‘populous and smoky city’, could equally have been applied to the new industrial cities of the English midlands: Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. Yet these polluted and problematic urban centres were also cradles of culture, innovation and imagination, and inspired a rich body of Romantic and Victorian urban writing that represents and invents the heterogeneous and uncontainable modern city, and the diverse, often strange lives of its inhabitants and visitors. In this module we will study texts by authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Lamb, Gaskell, Dickens, Thomson, Gissing and Conan Doyle, and consider a range of genres (social problem novel, autobiography, detective story, works of social exploration, symbolist poetry) and literary traditions, city types (the chimney-sweep, factory-worker, beggar and flâneur), urban spaces (street, park, factory, suburb) and motifs (the labyrinth, fog, prison and ‘the man in the crowd’).

In addition, students will be able to take two of the following 15 Credit modules from the Department of History

This module looks at ways in which the countryside was represented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seminars will explore topics such as the countryside in fiction (novels of Thomas Hardy), images of the countryside in painting and photography, the attempts to preserve a folk culture in England (Cecil Sharp and the English Folk Song movement) and elegies for the decline of a traditional rural society (George Bourne's 'Change in the Village', 1912). The values attached to rural culture, and the supposed significance of the countryside for the nation as a whole, make this topic a crucial one in debates about 'Englishness' in the period, and the module allows students to engage with a lively secondary literature, whilst also encouraging them to explore these questions through the study of a variety of contemporary responses.

This module explores the uses of the past in nineteenth-century Britain. Themes covered may include the values attached to historical references in art and architecture, attitudes towards heritage, restoration and preservation, the culture of museums, history as moral and political education, and recreations of the past. Students will have the opportunity to discuss the historical visions of major authors such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, as well as historical novelists of the time. There are also opportunities to focus on visual and architectural sources.

The Revolution can be perceived as 'a magnificent irrelevance': most rural people's lives in provincial France (that is, those of the majority of the population) underwent little significant change until the coming of the railways, some half a century later. Yet the dramatic collapse of Louis XVI's government, and the rapid changes which followed it, undeniably launched Europe into an era of mass politics and mass mobilisation, while within France new leaders not only executed the king but for a while brought organised Christianity under state-sponsored attack. This module will enable students, focusing on three key episodes, to engage with the Revolution's ten most tumultuous years, and with the historiographical debates about them from the 1960s onwards.

The Chartist campaign which began in Britain in the 1830s has been described as the first great working-class political movement in the history of the world. For some fifteen years it mobilised thousands of supporters and voiced their grievances – exclusion from political power, the punitive nature of the new poor law, the impact of rapid economic change – as well as aspirations for a new form of society. Drawing on primary sources and a rich historiography, this module seeks to evaluate the several strands of the Chartist challenge.

Although the idea of socialism can be traced back to at least the early nineteenth century, it was not until the century’s latter decades that organisations were formed to agitate for the establishment of a socialistic society in Britain. Principal among these organisations were the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party – all of which, along with other aspects of the period, shaped the character of the Labour Party in the early 1900s.

HST 6*** Ballads, Broadsides and Cartoons: The Firth Collection in Sheffield (Dr Timothy Baycroft)

The Nineteenth Century saw the production of a vast quantity of social and political commentary through ballads, broadsides and political cartoons, a substantial number of which were collected by Charles Harding Firth and deposited in the Sheffield University Library. The module will be taught in five, two-hour classes, each focusing on a particular set of texts from the Firth Collection, grouped around a theme (for example British views of the Napoleonic Wars, miner’s ballads or urban landscapes). These popular social and political commentaries of the day, will be placed into the broader context in order to achieve a more complete understanding of British (and to a lesser extent European) politics, society and culture.