Middlemarch and the Victorian Period Professor Sally Shuttleworth

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Victorian Literature — Lecture abstracts for Autumn 2001

Week 1

Middlemarch and the Victorian Period                          Professor Sally Shuttleworth

Middlemarch  was written shortly after the passage of the second Reform Bill, and set at the time of the first. From the vantage point of the early 1870s, George Eliot looks back to the 1830s, and explores many of the issues which were to dominate the Victorian age: electoral reform and class relations; the coming of the railways and industrialisation; developments in medicine and science; the decline of religion, and the ‘woman question’. The novel is epic in scope and experimental in form: Eliot seeks to offer a picture of an entire society within the confines of her novel, and to explore the individual’s placement in society and history. Realism is tempered by myth, and objectivity by considerations of the inevitable subjectivity of perception. The novel will be placed in the context of Victorian social, scientific, and cultural debate.

Week 2

Middlemarch and Realism                          Professor Neil Roberts

‘A man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass,’ says Tertius Lydgate, one of the main characters in Middlemarch. This is an excellent description of George Eliot’s method in the novel. There is an obvious structure of four parallel and intersecting plots, but there is a deeper structure that might be described as ‘concentric circles’: intimate psychological analysis, social relationships, historical forces.

This lecture will also examine the importance of science in Middlemarch, not just as a theme, but as a principle informing the novel’s world-view. In particular, I will be looking at the conflict between a scientific understanding of human existence and the Christian concept of Providence.

Thirdly, I will examine George Eliot’s narrative style. Middlemarch is famous for its ‘omniscient narrator’. Certainly the narrator is formidably knowledgeable, but the potentially oppressive effect of this is leavened by George Eliot’s extensive and brilliant use of dialogic narration, weaving many voices and points of view into her narrative style.

Narrators and Narration in Victorian Fiction                          Dr Shirley Foster

This lecture examines the various ways in which Victorian novelists exploit the relationship between writer and reader. These include direct commentary from an implied ‘author’ seeking directly to educate and influence audience response; first person narration, in which different temporal levels may co-exist; and multiple narration, in which a series of voices may interact with each other to offer a complex vision of experience. Victorian critics themselves frequently called attention to these narrative modes, and the lecture will also consider the conscious experimentation with narrative form in the period which they represent.  Authors to be discussed will include Dickens, Gaskell, the Brontes and Collins.

Week 3:

Victorian Poetry: Romantics to Victorians                        Dr Matthew Campbell

In histories of music, philosophy or European literature the whole of the 19th Century is referred to as ‘the Romantic’ age. Yet in English literature we draw a line under the deaths of Byron,  Keats or Shelley, (1820s) , and think that literature starts again with the publication of Tennyson’s Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), or the Great Reform Act (1832). This lecture looks at the possibility of generic differences between the Romantic and Victorian lyrics, and a Victorian as opposed to Romantic way of writing about the world. The similarities will be stressed, but also the innovations, through the poetry of Tennyson and Browning and the prose of Thomas Carlyle and Arthur Henry Hallam. Try to read Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ in advance. We’ll also be looking at Browning’s Sordello, but you should read ‘My Last Duchess’.

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Dramatic Poems: Browning and Tennyson                             Dr Hamish Mathison

Irresolution, fear, digression, uncertainty, doubt, avoidance of the truth, double-talk, lies, incomprehension, misapprehension, cowardice and subservience: this is a lecture about all that's good in Victorian poetry. The lecture builds on Dr Campbell's Tuesday lecture, and we'll spend the first half of today's looking at Tennyson before turning to Robert Browning. Written shortly after death of Arthur Henry Hallam, who was to become the subject of Tennyson’s remarkable In Memoriam, Tennyson's 'Ulysses' opens up the key ...

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