Networked PC
DVD/Video Projection
Library
Internet
The Blackboard virtual learning environment will be available (where relevant) to support this module. Details will be supplied in the module handbook.

Weekly Lecture and Seminar

Bocock, Robert, and Kenneth Thompson, Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, Understanding Modern Societies: Book 3 (London: Polity Press/O.U.P, 1992).
Dyos, H.J., and Michael Wolff, The Victorian city - images and realities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
John, Juliet, and Alice Jenkins, Rethinking Victorian culture (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 2000).
Shires, Linda M., Rewriting the Victorians - theory, history, and the politics of gender (London: Routledge, 1992).
Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century (London: Cassell, 1994).Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2000.
Malcolm Bradbury & James McFarlane, eds. Modernism. 1890-1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Chamberlain, J. Edward & Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York: Columbia Up, 1985.
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 1995.

1) Bibliography and mini-essay = 10%
2) Presentation = 10%
3) Personal Tutoring (3 meetings each semester) = 10%
4) Essay for January, 1,800 words = 30%
5) Essay for April, 2,000 words = 40%

This module will introduce students to English literature's involvement in the developing social, economic, cultural and conceptual processes of modernisation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The first part of the module is thematically organised around a number of key areas: Detecting the Modern City, Identity, and the Modern Subject. We will study exemplary works from nineteenth century prose writing (including texts such as Bleak House by Dickens, Poe's The Man of the Crowd: Bronte's, Wuthering Heights, Wilde's, Picture of Dorian Gray) and poetry (typically including poems by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Clare, D.G. Rossetti and Tennyson).The second part of the module focuses on modernity and modernisation in relation to literary and cultural developments in Britain, Ireland and the United States during the twentieth century. We will look at the changing ways (reflecting the disruptive socio-political changes of the period) in which notions of modernity and modernisation shaped, and were shaped by, literary and cultural production during this period, from early and high modernism to popular culture and notions of the postmodern. The course will focus on a variety of different literary forms and genres, and include reference to film and theoretical readings.

Students will have to use the Blackboard online system as part of this module group and tutor interaction, for submitting work, and downloading assignment questions.

1. DEMONSTRATE HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF KEY LITERARY TEXTS AND SPECIFIC FORMS OF NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH WRITING AND UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CULTURAL CONCEPTS OF MODERNITY AND MODERNISATION IN THE CONTEXT OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE OF THE RELEVANT PERIOD.
Knowledge & Understanding

2. IDENTIFY THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONCEPTS OF MODERNITY AND MODERNISATION FOR NINETEENTH CENTURY WRITING AND LOCATE THEM WITHIN THEIR WIDER CULTURAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS.
Analysis
Learning

3. APPLY THE MAIN METHODS OF LITERARY ENQUIRY VIA CLOSE READING SKILLS AND THE PROVISION OF THE SCHOLARLY APPARATUS OF BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FOOTNOTES IN COURSEWORK ESSAYS.
Enquiry

4. COMMUNICATE A COHERENT ARGUMENT IN ORAL AND WRITTEN FORM.
Communication

5. REFLECT CRITICALLY ON WRITTEN WORK AND ON THE GROUP PROJECT PROCESS.
Reflection