To help you feel prepared for your postgraduate studies, we’ve gathered together a range of course related activities including suggested reading, useful websites and some great things to do right now.
Suggested reading
You’ll be given far more information about which textbooks to read and introduced to the University Library, as well as the many ebooks we have for you to access when you begin your studies. And we don’t recommend rushing out to buy texts before you arrive. But if you can pick up a second hand copy, borrow from a library, or access online, the following texts will be helpful to explore:
LIT4000: Research Skills (semester one)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
We’ll be discussing Dickens’ text in our core Research Skills module. There are many cheap and free editions available which are fine for general use. We recommend a good academic edition like Oxford, Penguin or Broadview.
LIT4001: Romantic Movements (semester one)
Texts for the first few weeks of term will comprise Romantic poetry and prose freely available on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment alongside relevant critical material. Texts for purchase include:
Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, ed. Lyndon J. Dominique (Broadview, 2007) [Week 4]
Sarah Perry, Melmoth (Profile, 2018) [Week 10]
Chris Riddell, Ghost Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (Pan Macmillan, 2013) [Week 11]
LIT4002: Victorian Decades (semester two)
Texts for this module include a broad range of novels, journalism, art, historical sources, poetry, short stories and more. All shorter texts will be provided on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment. The big texts to read in advance are:
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854) [Week 2]
Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) [Week 4]
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860-61) [Week 5]
Henry Rider Haggard, She (1887) [Week 8]
LIT4003: Entertaining the Victorians (semester two)
Texts and sources for this interdisciplinary module will include digital newspaper archives and primary sources, which will be provided via the University’s Virtual Learning Environment and in class.
Lee Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment (Yale, 2019).
General Literary and Historical Study
This is an interdisciplinary MA, drawing on approaches from literary studies, history, and different disciplines in the humanities. We will teach you all of these and help you build your skills – we do not expect you to have all of this knowledge coming into the degree! If you wish to get a good foundation in the approaches we’ll be using on this degree, then you may want to look at:
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, This Thing Called Literature (London: Routledge, 2015)
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 5th edition (London: Routledge, 2016)
Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (2012)
The Cambridge Companion series are excellent introductions to specific literary periods, movements, and authors. The Cambridge Companion includes companions to ‘British Romantic Poetry’, ‘Fiction in the Romantic Period’, ‘The Victorian Novel’, ‘Victorian Poetry’, ‘Charles Dickens’, ‘The Fin de Siecle’. Most of the Companions will be available for free through your library account.
Useful websites
Depending on your areas of interest, you might want to visit the following websites:
The Victorian Web features introductory articles on key aspects of Victorian culture and society.
The Internet Archivefeatures thousands of digitised books and periodicals from the nineteenth century. See what you can unearth!
The British Newspaper Archive(subscription required) features millions of pages of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines — it’s a great tool for finding new research topics.
Dr Bob Nicholson’s twitter feeds (@DigiVictorianand @VictorianHumour) feature thousands of curious Victorian discoveries, some of which we’ll be exploring in Entertaining the Victorians.
Dr Bob Nicholson recently presented the BBC podcast series ‘Killing Victoria’which explores the lives of seven men who attempted to assassinate the Queen. You can listen on BBC Sounds, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Meet your programme lead and course specialists:
Dr Bob Nicholson (MA Programme Leader)
Reader in History and Digital Humanities, Dr Bob Nicholson works on the history of nineteenth-century popular culture and leads the Entertaining the Victorians module in semester two.
Dr Laura Eastlake is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature. Her interests include Victorian masculinity, classical reception, and gothic fiction. She leads the Victorian Decades module in semester two.
Reader in Romanticisms, Dr Andrew McInnes is currently leading an AHRC-funded project exploring the ‘Romantic Ridiculous.’ He leads the Romantic Movements module in semester one.