Zwierlein, Anne-Julia

Victorians
were obsessed with tales of death and resuscitation, uncanny doubles and
sinister revenants from the 'other side'. Tracing the history of this
fascination from eighteenth-century Gothic tales and poems to Victorian tales
of terror as well as sensation novels, we will consider relevant socio-cultural
developments and literary-psychological approaches such as fin-de-siècle spiritualism, Freud's ideas on the
"uncanny" and Todorov's investigations of the "fantastic"
before proceeding to analyse a broad range of texts from the 1840s onwards,
with an emphasis on late-Victorian fiction. Narratives of doubles and
revenants, negotiating conceptions of identity and otherness/’iterability’, the
public and the private, life and death, provide deep insights into Victorian
cultural change, tied as they are to debates in theology, evolutionary theory,
inheritance law, economic theory (especially on the circulation and
(re-)distribution of commodities), forensic medicine, and gender relations. The
following texts will be dealt with: Edgar Allan Poe, "William Wilson"
(1839) and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), anon.,
"Secrets of the Lecture Room" (1844), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte
Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) [excerpts],
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
(1864-5), George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
(1859) [excerpts], Wilkie Collins, The
Woman in White (1860) [excerpts], Walter Pater, on the “Mona Lisa”, from Studies
in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Rider
Haggard, She (1887) [excerpts], Oscar
Wilde, The Picture ofDorian Gray
(1891), Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved
(1897), Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).

This
seminar will explore early modern notions of foreignness, ethnic otherness and
the socio-historical, mythological and symbolic dimensions of the English
racial imaginary in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, bearing in
mind that this was a period in which concepts of ‚race‘ were not yet linked to the
apparent determinisms of ‚biology‘. We will examine the fluidity of racial
identity, the making and unmaking of difference, and the metaphorical uses of
ethnic otherness in English cultural representations to explore a variety of
social and cultural categories. We will thus read (and, occasionally, watch)
our Shakespeare plays as both driving and commenting the formation of social
ideologies in a world increasingly shaped by colonialism and its politics. Our
set texts are the following Shakespeare plays: Titus Andronicus (1594); The
Merchant of Venice (1600); Othello
(1603/04); Antony and Cleopatra
(1606/07); The Tempest (1610/11).

Requirements: active participation, an oral presentation / a team-teaching session, and a term paper (c. 10-12 pages = c. 5000 words; deadline: 31 March 2025).

Texts: I recommend the play texts from the Arden Shakespeare series; but the Oxford Shakespeare and Cambridge Shakespeare series are very good alternatives. Or: invest in a collected works edition, fors instance Wells/Taylor, eds, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Oxford; or Greenblatt, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin.

HS Seascapes: British and Irish Maritime Writing – Mo,
12-14                               PT
1.0.2

The ever-shifting boundary
between land and sea provides an ideal backdrop and symbolic catalyst for
literary explorations of human existence, science and theology. This seminar
will begin with brief glimpses at the Romantic maritime poetry of S.T.
Coleridge and Mary Robinson, then turn to the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold,
then to some sea stories by Joseph Conrad, “Falk” (1901) and “Typhoon” (1902),
before turning to Daphne Du Maurier’s famous novel about ‘wrecking’, Jamaica Inn (1936). We will then move on
to the twenty-first century, with Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (1999); Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (2004); John Banville,
The Sea (2005); Graham Swift, Tomorrow (2007), Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (2007), and Anne
Enright, The Gathering (2007). In
addition to analysing these novels' (post-)postmodern narrative techniques and
references to earlier uses of the seaside topos (Arnold, Kingsley, Dickens,
Hardy, Stoker, Woolf, Conrad), we will also consider socio-cultural and
historical contexts such as Britain's imperial past as 'ruler of the seas' and
the beginnings of British seaside tourism in the nineteenth century. Throughout,
we will consider literary negotiations of the land-sea interface as an
ecosystem studied by scientists, environmentalists and ecocritics.

Requirements: active participation, an oral
presentation / a team-teaching session, and a term paper (c. 15-20 pages = c.
7000 words; deadline: 31 March 2025).

Texts: Joseph Conrad, Typhoon
and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts, Oxford World’s Classics 1991ff.; Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (Virago Modern Classics,
1995); Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater
Lightship (London: Picador, 1999); Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (2004; repr. Fort Washington: Harvest Books,
2006); John Banville, The Sea
(London: Picador, 2005); Graham Swift, Tomorrow
(London: Picador, 2007); Ian McEwan, On
Chesil Beach (London: Vintage Books, 2007); Anne Enright, The Gathering (New York: Black Cat,
2007). Shorter
texts, especially the poetry, will be provided as excerpts via GRIPS.

VL
Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture – Di, 10-12

Beginning with the Act of Union between Scotland and
England in 1707, we will discuss eighteenth-century British nation-building and
Britain's rise as a commercial and imperial power - historical trajectories
that in the recent past (Scottish independence referendum in 2014; completion
of 'Brexit' in 2019) have appeared to be reversible. Indeed, a significant part
of the impetus for the new British Union in the eighteenth century was rivalry
with the European continent: As Linda Colley argues in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), it was the result of
a century of intermittent warfare between Protestant Britain and (Catholic)
continental nations, notably France and Spain. We will examine the political,
cultural and literary developments of this fascinating period, looking at the
unprecedented urban growth and the emergence of two new political parties, the
Whigs and the Tories. Considering the impact of the French Revolution and
American Independence on British writing, we will also examine the slave trade
and British campaigns for the abolition of slavery. The course will define
cultural moments such as the 'Battle of the Books', the Gothic Revival, the
Enlightenment and the new cultures of sensibility and civility, the animal
rights campaigns, the invention of tourism (the 'Grand Tour') and modern
capitalism, and the new dangers of stock market crashes as illustrated by the
'South Sea Bubble' (1720). Authors discussed include Jonathan Swift, Laurence
Sterne, Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Daniel Defoe, Edmund Burke, William Godwin,
James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel
Johnson, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. We will also look at the slave
narratives of Ottobah Cuguano and Olaudah Equiano, and the engravings of William
Hogarth. As this was the first time in British literary history that women
writers were able to compete with men in terms of sales and literary
recognition, we will also look at the work of William Hogarth. As this was the
first time in British literary history that women writers were competing with
men in terms of sales and literary reputation, equal emphasis is given to Anne
Finch, Eliza Haywood, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft and
Frances Burney.

Requirements:
regular attendance and written final exam.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
9th rev. ed., vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt: The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2012); vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth
Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012).