Grill Anna-Maria

This seminar will explore the phenomenon of the literary detective – a figure that attained both immense popularity as well as a startling literary and cultural presence during the second half of the nineteenth-century. Following on the tracks of the thrilling tales of crime, violence, and mystery of sensation and detective fiction, we will chart the emergence of the literary detective via an exploration of this figure’s many different shapes and guises. In this seminar, we will investigate this phenomenon via selected examples of sensation and detective fiction via works (and excerpts of works) by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edgar Allen Poe, Catherine Louisa Pirkis, Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Morrison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and L.T. Meade. In our sessions, we will place these texts into their wider historical and cultural contexts and look into the ways in which these texts engage with the multifaceted figure of the literary detective, different sub-genres of detective fiction (e.g. occult detective literature, whodunit, locked room mystery), the established Victorian ideologies, social structures, and gender dynamics, as well as innovations within the printing sector and periodical culture. Key topics for class discussions will be nineteenth-century crime, the emergence of the detective plot among the rapidly increasing pool of crime literature, the rise of criminal anthropology, forensics and toxicology, different types of detective figures (e.g. armchair detective, occult detective, scientific detective), the relationship between detective and Victorian legal apparatus as well as between detective and criminal, as well as the gradual emergence of the woman detective. Thus, over the course of this seminar, we will encounter several different representatives of the Victorian fictional sleuth, ranging from Collins’s quirky Sergeant Cuff, newspaper sensation Sexton Blake, Pirkis’s and Meade’s women detectives Loveday Brooke and Miss Beringer, to a figure that is even today still widely considered the epitome of the (Victorian) detective: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Despite the nineteenth century’s prominent association
with realism and rationality, the contemporary British and Irish audiences
shared our own modern-day enthusiasm for supernatural tales. The literature of
their time fairly teemed with fairies, changelings, witches, boggarts, goblins,
and vampires. This seminar will explore this phenomenon via tracing the
popularity of folklore, fairy tales, and the fantastic in selected examples of nineteenth-century
British and Irish fiction. For this purpose, we will be investigating works –
and excerpts of works – by James Hogg, George MacDonald, William Morris, Edith
Nesbit, Charles Kingsley, Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, R.D. Blackmore, Fiona MacLeod,
Juliana Horatia Ewing, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Butler Yeats, amongst
others. Our focus will lie chiefly on short stories and novellas, but we will
also explore the influence of folklore, fairy tales, and the fantastic on the
nineteenth-century novel and selected examples of poetry, as well as
investigate Victorian collections, adaptations, and re-writings of local
folklore of the British Isles (and Eastern Europe). In so doing, we will look
into the conflicting ways in which these texts employ the seemingly remote dreamscapes
of folklore, fairy tales, and the fantastic to engage with the established
Victorian ideologies, social structures, and gender dynamics, as well as
grapple with the forces of change in their merging of magic and aspects of
modernity, rendering them much more than just “far off-tales and children’s
stories”. Further key topics for our class discussions will be folklore, fairy
tales, and the fantastic’s engagement with the British storytelling traditions,
their links to the Gothic and Romantic tradition, aspects of internal
colonialism, the dynamic between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment
rationality, the development of the genre of the literary fantastic and a
certain rhetoric of superstition, and these stories’ appeal to a double
audience that far exceeds the spatial boundaries of the nursery.

This seminar will explore the phenomenon of Victorian
sensation fiction, a genre that peaked during the 1860s. Full of thrilling
tales of violence, (female) criminals, false identities, adultery, doubles,
prophetic dreams, and early examples of detection plots, sensation fiction
addresses previously largely unspoken taboos and is all about transgressing and
negotiating boundaries. As such, the contemporary critics levelled often
violent criticism at the “sensation school of literature”, dismissing it as
merely a cheap mass-market product designed for nothing but quick, yet potentially
dangerous entertainment for the Victorian readership. It is, however, in
particular this popular mass-appeal that renders the sensation novel – very
much a product of its time and, as such, highly reflective of it – a veritable
treasure trove to modern readers and scholars, providing highly productive
insights into the mindset, culture, and rapid transformations of the Victorian
period. In this seminar, we will be investigating this phenomenon via selected
examples of sensation fiction, such as – amongst others – via works (and
excerpts of works) by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Woods, Charles
Reade, Rhoda Broughton, Ouida, and Sheridan Le Fanu. In our sessions, we will
place these texts into their wider historical and cultural contexts by
examining the dominant discourses shaping society at the time, as well as their
expression in contemporary journalism, visual art, (pseudo-)scientific literature,
and illustration. In so doing, we will look into the conflicting ways in which
these texts engage with the established Victorian ideologies, social
structures, and gender dynamics, as well as the new printing technologies, and
nineteenth-century periodical culture. Additional key topics for class
discussion will be sensation fiction’s engagement with aspects of crime,
sexuality, gender, and identity, as well as its thematization of
in-between-spaces, medicine and science, (female) madness and the figure of the
mad-doctor, early detection plots, and the dynamic between written and visual
text in sensation fiction’s serialisation.

Requirements: active participation, short reading responses, term
paper (c. 8-10 pages)

Ghost stories are
as old as literature itself, yet to this day continue to exert an immense
fascination upon readers’ minds. Similar to our own modern-day enthusiasm for
supernatural tales, the Victorians were very fond of ghost stories and the
format’s intermingling of past, present, and future reflected the general
spirit of transition and the resulting anxieties that shaped the greater part
of the century and, consequently, its culture. As such, ghost stories presented
an ideal vehicle to grapple with the forces of change and the lingering past,
be it in the guise of ghosts, demons, visions, doppelgangers, or figures of
traditional Celtic folklore. This seminar will explore the phenomenon of the
Victorian ghost story via tracing its multifaceted spectres from the remote
Scottish and Irish countryside, rugged Welsh coast, and wild Yorkshire moors to
the urban maze of mid- and late nineteenth-century London. For this purpose, we
will be investigating selected examples of ghost stories in nineteenth-century
literature, such as – amongst others – works (and short excerpts of works) by
Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, J.Y. Akerman,
Henry James, Robert Stephen Hawker, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Tom
Hood, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Our focus will lie chiefly on short stories
and novellas, but we will also explore the impact of the ghost story on the
nineteenth-century novel. In our sessions, we will place these texts into their
wider historical and cultural contexts by examining the dominant discourses
shaping society at the time, as well as their expression in contemporary
journalism, visual art, (pseudo-)scientific literature, and illustration. In so
doing, we will look into the conflicting ways in which these texts engage with
the established Victorian ideologies, social structures, and gender dynamics,
as well as the rise of spiritualism, psychology, technologies of vision, and
nineteenth-century periodical culture. Additional key topics for class discussion
will be the ghost story’s engagement with British storytelling and Christmas
traditions, folklore, middle-class culture and domesticity, as well as the ties
between the ghost story and the woman writer.

Requirements: active participation, short reading responses, term
paper (c. 8-10 pages)

Please buy
the following texts:

Charles Dickens, A
Christmas Carol (1843)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Michael Cox, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford
UP, 2003) -- a collection of short Victorian ghost stories, including some of
our course texts

All other course
texts (e.g., Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Charles Dickens’s “The
Signal Man”, as well as selected short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu) and
materials will be made available on GRIPS.

PS 2: “That
Great Chaos of Humanity”: Narratives of Urban Modernity in Late Victorian
Britain

“I determined to go to London, and lose myself in that
great chaos of humanity.” (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret)

During the nineteenth century, Great Britain
experienced a process of urbanisation of an unprecedented extent, changing both
its landscape and the mindset of its people forever. This seminar will explore
late nineteenth-century literary, journalistic, visual, and sociological representations
of these new urban centres and, by doing so, their various narratives of the
new experience of urban modernity. For this purpose, we will be investigating
the portrayal of the late nineteenth-century city via the example of the
English capital, London, in selected works of Late Victorian Urban Gothic, Realist
Literature, Slum Writing, and Detective Literature set either completely or
partly in the English metropolis, such as works (and excerpts of works) by
Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, George Gissing, Oscar Wilde,
Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L.T. Meade. We will place these literary
texts in their wider historical and cultural context by examining the dominant
discourses shaping society at the time as well as their expression in
contemporary journalism, visual art, sociological and (pseudo-)scientific
literature, and advertisements. Key topics for class discussion will be the
conflicting ways in which these texts engage with the daily reality of the late
nineteenth-century city, with the established Victorian ideologies and social
structures, the reality of the fin de siècle atmosphere and late
nineteenth-century urban life and transport, and, last but not least, the
unprecedented experience of urban modernity torn between progress and anxious
nostalgia.

This seminar will explore late nineteenth-century literary, journalistic, visual and (pseudo)-scientific representations of the metropolitan monster haunting the heart of the English nation, London, at the fin de siècle. For this purpose, we will be investigating the portrayal of this multifaceted figure in selected works of Late Victorian Urban Gothic, Scientific Romance and Detective Literature set either completely or partly in the English metropolis, such as works by Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and L.T. Meade. We will place these literary texts in their wider historical and cultural context by examining the dominant discourses shaping society at the time as well as their expression in contemporary journalism, visual art, (pseudo)-scientific literature and advertisements. Key topics for class discussion will be the conflicting ways in which these texts engage with the established Victorian ideologies and social structures, with the reality of the fin de siècle atmosphere and late nineteenth-century urban life, and with contemporary attitudes to femininity/masculinity and gender relations against the backdrop of budding consumerism.