Competences

• a)Guide an independent analysis the stylistic extent of elements such as realism and the Victorian Narrative in the Victorian Novel;
• b)Critically evaluate the different styles that define the Victorian Novel whether it is the characterisations and caricatures of Dickensian satire of his times, or the proto-Feminist themes and feminist undercurrents in Bronte’s Jane Eyre to George Eliot’s treatment of the female psyche and sexuality, mapped against female emancipation and independence foregrounded by the Reform Bill.
•  

Knowledge

• a)Develop a sound knowledge of the stylistic extent of the Victorian novel and elements such as realism and the Victorian Narrative;
• b)Demonstrate an appreciation of the Victorian Novel as a literary genre which reflects a generation of writers within their historical context;
• c)Comprehend these influences and identify the key themes that contributed to the evolution of the Victorian novel up to the emergence and development of the Early Modernist novel;
• d)Describe the irony of the Victorian era, which, influenced by the fast-developing innovations in science and technology, seemed to impart to Victorian novelists the licence to dabble with novel concepts related to socio-economic issues and injustice, gender and sexuality issues, masked beneath the veneer of Victorian morality and decorum and over-shadowed by a strong social class system;
• e)Recognise social and ethical issues depicted in Victorian fiction, including poverty, gender roles, class inequality, morality, and societal reform;
• f)Critically appreciate how the Victorian Novel anticipated the Modernist phenomena of Literature driven by the need to create anew and to embody diversification at a very intense and proliferated pace, within the context of a renegotiation with Victorian mores.
•  

Skills

• a)Critically analyse Victorian literary and novelistic themes and issues in an open and objective manner—including the ways in which Victorian novelists were indeed so diverse and ever so experimentative, taking risks, yet contained within the literary convention at the time, which necessitated a covert narrative style;
• b)Comment objectively and critically on the Victorian Novel which is not a static genre or category type of novel, as it goes through its own etymology and development, transformation and experimentation;
• c)Evaluate the experimentations with thematic diversity within the stylistic convention of Literary Realism, and a focus on external description and narrative; the thematic innovations in the Victorian Novel, such as the contrasting thematic concerns of Charles Dickens and the liberating foregrounding narrative in George Eliot’s, Middlemarch;
• d)Apply this learning to understand how this Victorian tendency for novels to be written in a realist style, to deal with the external and social aspects of the narrative, with the total exclusion of the internal worlds and consciousness of their characters, such as the work of Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, served to motivate the Early Modernists.
•