Grill Anna-Maria

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.