123042 PS PS Literary Studies (2025S)

“Please, sir, I want some more”, Oliver Twist’s courageaous plea for more gruel in Charles Dickens’ famous novel of the same name has come to represent the role of food in Victorian literature more generally. However, as this proseminar will show, Victorian culinary narratives have more to offer than Dickens’ hungry, destitute children. During the reign of Queen Victoria, in the nineteenth century the British Empire reached its peak. Violent colonial expansion made possible industrialization und rapid urbanization: When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, London was a city of two million inhabitants. When she died in 1901, it was a metropolis of six and a half million. These dramatic socioeconomic changes set in motion labor and suffrage movements as well as animal liberation campaigns – and simultaneous attempts to curtail these radical, progressive movements in the name of religion and morality.

Literary food studies will help us make sense of these changes: Zooming in on the mundane and often overlooked, yet essential, allows us to shine a light on the politics of Victorian society and culture more generally. Our exploration of Victorian culinary narratives will cover Dickens’ hungry children and Charlotte Bronte’s starving protagonist Jane Eyre (1847), both dealing with “gruel” and “burnt porridge” in educational institutions that focused more on disciplining than nourishing children. While these novels allow us to explore Victorian scarcity and constraint, also in terms of gender, race, and class, Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem “Goblin Market” (1862) provides a pathway into the more fantastic, puzzling and abundant side of food in Victorian literature.

This class introduces students to key texts in nineteenth-century British literature from a literary food studies perspective. Based on our class readings and interactive exercises, students will learn how to critically analyse literary texts of various genres with expert terminology and methodologies, and how to understand texts in their specific sociocultural contexts (including, e.g. the political and economic circumstances of their publication). Students will be able to analyse literary food texts from an intersectional perspective after they finish this class, as they will have learned how to recognize and scrutinize cultural markers of difference like gender, race, class or sexuality in the texts discussed. Most importantly, students will learn basics in academic writing in the age of AI in line with academic best practice, how to look for secondary literature, how to formulate research questions and find one’s analytic voice, how to structure their first research papers and bibliographies.