123422 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2018S)

Warning:
Ok, how to put it? This is one for you bookworms out there. In other words: if reading lots and lots is not your thing, or if it is your thing but this term you have three more SEs to pass, you better pick a different course, because we are going to plough our way through four novels. Yes, four. 1379 pages of fiction; give or take. In 14 weeks. Yess. Don't say you haven't been warned! Caveat aside: all four belong to the category of 'good read' verging on 'page turner'. But still: you must be able to make the time. We are going to tackle them in chronological order of publication date, so if you cannot be deterred: drop in at Facultas bookshop soon and start reading.

It is no coincidence that the four novels we are going to discuss have all been published recently. Neo-Victorian fiction first became fashionable in the second half of the 20th century just think of Wide Sargasso Sea, or The French Lieutenant's Woman, or The Siege of Krishnapur or Sarah Waters's 'trilogy' (Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity). During the Noughties, a subgenre within neo-Victorian fiction grew more pronounced: biofiction, that is, literary texts that base the stories they tell on the lives of historical figures. This subgenre is precisely what we are going to focus on. Since the whole point of biofiction is the tension between history and literary imagination, it is impossible to comment on their relationship or analyse the stylistic devices the novels employ, if one is unclear about the facts. For this reason, it is imperative that you acquaint yourselves with what is known about the historical figures that feature in the novels discussed. These historical figures are: the explorer, translator, author, speaker of 30 plus languages and general jack-of-all-trades Richard Francis Burton (Troyanov); the fossil hunter Mary Anning and her geologist 'friends' (Chevalier); the poet Tennyson, the photographer Cameron, the author and paedophile Carroll (Truss); and the novelist Evans/Eliot (Duncker). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a very good source to start, and its entries will be made available as .pdf-files on Moodle. The four core-texts, two by female authors, two by male writers, have been chosen because of the broad spectrum of theories (evolution), inventions (photography), tantalising (moral; epistemological) questions (where is the source of the Nile? Does religion or science give the 'right' answer to the origin and purpose of the human species? Can there be an ethics beyond religion?), debates (about the age of planet earth; about extinction) and new (pseudo-) sciences (phrenology; palaeontology; geology) which they tackle, that were fascinating to the Victorians as our historical 'others'. We are going to discuss these in the context of a discourses of power structured along the axis of race, class, gender and desire.