123044 PS PS Literary Studies (2022W)

“There’s no place like London”, Sweeney Todd exclaims in Stephen Sondheim’s musical adaptation; and indeed there are many Londons to explore. The writer and comedian Stephen Fry expresses its diversity and its paradoxes when he says that London is like the English language: "proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane."

This course will be dedicated to some of the different visions of the city of London in the Western literary imaginary. The nineteenth century witnesses the massive growth of what became the world’s largest city by 1825, and the Victorian era itself sees London’s population more than tripled in the span of 60 years. The turn of the century and the twentieth century, through world wars and cultural diversity, further impact the people’s relationship with the metropolis. Capital of the British Empire, symbol of Great Britain’s growing industrialisation, or ‘wasteland’ and monster swallowing people in wretched living conditions, we will examine the different ways that the city has been imagined by Victorian and early twentieth-century writers by engaging in a critical reading of several key texts of the era. The importance of the historical background to the texts we are studying will be a regular focus of attention as we consider the dark aspects of early Victorian London (Reynolds), the fin de siècle urban Gothic (Stevenson), the detective and the Empire (Conan Doyle), a satirical take on the London society (Wilde), and a day in the life of post-war London (Woolf).

In this course, participants will gain a knowledge of some important texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as an understanding of how a variety of writers have responded to significant historical events and contexts. The course will also enable participants to develop their practical skills in the critical analysis of literary texts, and will tackle the basic techniques of academic writing, such as how to formulate a research question and how to structure a paper.