Table of Contents - Birkbeck, University of London

Transcription

School of Arts
Department of English & Humanities
MA Romantic Studies
2013-14
Contents
Introduction
Programme Structure
Term Dates
Starting your Course
Romantic Objects (Core)
Romantic Feelings (Core)
Study Skills
Option Courses
Victorian Society & Culture: Progress and Anxiety
Modernising Victorians
(MA Victorian Studies Autumn Core- opened as option to our full-timers)
Colonialism and Modernity
The Book Unbound
Death in Victorian Culture
Victorian Emotions
Romantic Studies Internship
Page
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3
4
6
9
15
22
24
25
31
Directed Reading In Romantic Studies
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Summer Term Activities
60
Coursework Presentation and Plagiarism
Coursework Submission
Research Ethics
Grade-Related Criteria
Assessment
Degree Regulations
Disability Statement
Student Support and Available Resources
Other Resources and Organisations
Other Graduate Activities
Academic Contact Details
Appendices – Term Dates
Policy of Submission of Essays and Dissertations
Starting with Moodle
Programme Structures and Regulations
Common Award Scheme
Map of Campus
Dissertation Proposal Form
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Published July 2013
This document is for reference only. Every effort was made to ensure that information was correct at time of print, but
discrepancies may still occur due to the nature of this document. Any changes will be communicated to you via your registered email address as soon as the School of Arts is made aware of any issues.
1
Introduction
Welcome to the MA Romantic Studies. This new interdisciplinary programme offers a
deep grounding in the multisensorial and material dimensions of Romantic literature
and culture around 1750-1850. ‘Romanticism’ has long been associated with an
interiorization of the imagination the move from a dependence on sense impressions to
an idealist account of the imagination and the ‘free play of the faculties’. Inspiration, in
this account, depends on an autonomous aesthetic sphere not determined by
disciplines, taxonomies, external objects. Yet the period from 1750 to 1850 marks the
rise of the museum, the gallery, the zoo and a range of other sites and institutions as
arenas for public culture (the British Museum opens in 1753, the museum of the Royal
College of Surgeons in 1799, the National Gallery in 1824, the Zoological Gardens in
1828 to specialists and 1847 to the general public and this is to name but a few).
The two core courses give you an exciting and rigorous introduction to key questions,
texts, poetics, and aesthetic theories and practices of the Romantic Period. ‘Romantic
Objects’ offers you the chance to work on objects, texts, and artefacts in London
museums and archives, such as stuffed birds, exotic artefacts of colonial travel, locks of
hair, death masks, monuments and souvenirs in Romantic period museums,
environments, and displays, including the British Museum, the John Soane’s Museum,
and William Bullock’s London Museum and Pantherion. You will encounter a wide
range of objects and texts, literary, artistic, scientific — some of them shaped by a
disciplinary practice, some adisciplinary, some deliberately resisting established
practices and forms. The module will help develop methodologies for identifying,
researching, and writing about Romantic Objects. ‘Romantic Feelings’ explores the
role of the senses in the production of personal and cultural identity in the Romantic
Period. Positing a form of subjective participation, be it a form of sympathy or ‘impartial
spectatorship’, feelings offer a new way of analyzing history through forms of cultural
mediation. You will learn to understand the period through the forms (literary and other)
in which events and other experiences ‘came home’ to the reader and viewer. Each
class is structured around a feeling or cluster of feelings, such as the sublime, fear,
ecstasy, indolence, and joy. You will get a strong grounding in key Romantic period
texts and genres, and learn how literature explored and shaped the experience of
important events at a distance. Thanks to the programme’s interdisciplinary approach,
you will be thinking about literature as part of a multisensorial range of cultural
phenomena. Cutting across conventional, but anachronistic, disciplinary boundaries,
this programme recuperates the cultural forms that fall in the cracks between today’s
disciplines. Together the core courses give you a strong knowledge of Romantic period
literature and culture, and rigorous training in interdisciplinary methodologies and
prepare you to tailor your studies to your own research interests and to engage in
advanced MA Level work in your optional courses. The programme offers advanced MA
level work and is an excellent preparation for doctoral research.
MA Romantic Studies is run within the Department of English and Humanities, but
brings together specialists from other departments in the School of Arts at Birkbeck,
drawing on expertise in Art History, Museum Studies, and European Languages and
Cultures. Thanks to our collaboration with MA European Cultures, this MA opens up
Romantic culture as a transnational European phenomenon.
2
Structure and Timetable of the Course
Part-time Study
Year One
Year Two
Autumn
Core Module:
Romantic Objects
Spring
Option Module
Summer
Summer Term
Project
Core Module:
Romantic Feelings
Option Module
Dissertation
Research
Workshops and
individual
supervision
Dissertation Topic
is due by 31
January
First consultation
with supervisor by
end of spring term
Submission of
Dissertation
Autumn
Core Module:
Romantic Objects
Spring
Core Module:
Romantic Feelings
Summer
Summer Term
Project
Option Module
Option Module
Dissertation
Research
Workshops and
individual
supervision
Full-time Study
Year One
Dissertation Topic
is due by 31
January
First consultation
with supervisor by
end of spring term
Submission of
Dissertation
Attendance Requirements
Taking a degree course at Birkbeck requires a high level of commitment, it is important
that you attend lectures and classes consistently. It is your responsibility to make
sure you sign the register at every class you attend. It is accepted that through
illness or exceptional pressure at home or at work you may have to miss occasional
classes, but if you have to be absent from several classes, or you know that you
are going to have difficulties in attending regularly, please inform your Course
Director as many departments enforce a 75% attendance policy.
3
Term Dates and Deadlines
Monday 30September 2013 to Friday 13 December 2013
Monday 6 January 2014 to Friday 21 March 2014
Monday 28 April 2014 to Friday 11 July 2014
Option modules run over one term and take up at least ten teaching weeks. Reading
weeks are observed in most courses.
Deadlines and Important Dates
Essay deadlines:
Please note that these deadlines apply to ALL students on the MA programmes within
the Department English & Humanities. Those students who take options within other
Departments should adhere to the deadlines given by the Department in which the
option takes place. Any queries/ concerns should be directed to your MA Course
Director.
Catalogue Entry (Romantic Objects, FT only): Monday 25 November 2013, 12.00,
noon.
Romantic Objects (Core) essay (FT only): Monday 6 January 2014, 12.00, noon.
Critical Bibliography (Romantic Feelings, PT & FT): Monday 24 February 2014,
12.00, noon.
Romantic Feelings (Core), essay (PT &FT): Monday 28 April 2014, 12.00, noon.
Option Essay(s) – Term 2: Monday 28 April 2014, 12.00, noon (unless otherwise
stated).
Dissertation form: Friday 31 January 2014 (FT and year 2 PT only)
- to be submitted to Annmarie Shadie, Administrator.
Dissertation (FT and year 2 PT only): 12.00 noon, Monday 29 September 2014, 12.00,
noon.
NB. Deadlines for option courses offered outside the Department of English and
Humanities may differ. Students should check with the teacher of the option
concerned.
Option choice deadlines:
Students are required to submit their option choices to the relevant Postgraduate
Administrator by the given deadlines:
Autumn-term option choices:
Spring-term option choices:
Monday 2 September 2013
Friday 22 October 2013
Please ensure that you have notified your course administrator of your choices by the
deadline. Acceptance on the option is subject to the approval of your Programme
Director. You may also select options outside of the MA offerings subject to the
approval of your Programme Director; when the option is external to the programme, it
will also need approval by the relevant Tutor and Programme Director, according to the
rules of each MA.
4
Contacts
Director:
Dr Luisa Calè – [email protected]; 020 3073 8412
Administrator:
Annmarie Shadie – [email protected]; 020 3073 8379
Please note: any students taking an option based in another department, e.g., History,
should submit their essays to the Postgraduate Administrator within English &
Humanities, who will forward it on to the relevant administrator in the host department.
5
Starting your Course
Enrolment: Important Information
After receiving an offer of a place on the degree course, you need to enrol as soon as
possible (see Administrative information, below). For early applicants this option is
usually available starting in May and for late applicants (those interviewed in
September) may experience some delay in receiving their enrolment letters at what is
the busiest time of the year for Registry.
The College will expect you to have formally enrolled and to have begun paying your
fees by mid-October. You must enrol by the end of October or you may not be eligible
to continue your degree.
A student who withdraws after enrolling is liable for payment of fees for the first term of
their intended study, and all subsequent terms up to and including the term in which
they withdraw or for the full fees due for all modular enrolments (whichever is greater).
Fees are not returnable, but requests for ex-gratia refunds of part of the fees paid in
cases where a student is obliged to withdraw because of circumstances beyond the
student's own control (but normally excluding changes in employment) may be made.
All such refunds are subject to an administrative charge of £100, and will be pro-rated
to reflect the proportion of a study already elapsed.
Fees/ Finance
College fees may be paid by many methods, The College Finance Office deals with
fees and you should communicate and negotiate with them directly on 020 7631 6362.
Students who fail to pay their fees may become ineligible to continue the course or
unable to submit assessments. Any student who has a debt to the College at the end
of the year will not have their marks relayed to them. Neither the Course Director nor
any of your supervisors have the power to waive fees or sanction delays in payment.
How to get your Birkbeck ID card
Once you have completed your enrolment, you will be entitled to an ID card - here's
what you need to do:
The simplest way to get your ID card is by ordering it via your My Birkbeck profile. Just
upload a recent image of yourself and submit your order.
Alternatively, visit the My Birkbeck Helpdesk where we can take a photo of you and
produce a card. Please note you may be required to queue during busy periods.
The ID card will remain valid for the duration of your studies, and you will not be issued
with a new card for each subsequent academic year.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/you/cards
Contact Details/Email
Birkbeck students are required to maintain their personal details via the “My Studies”
Portal (student intranet) throughout their period of study. Failure to inform maintain this
information via your student portal will mean that you may miss important information
6
concerning the course: all documentation, reading lists, class notices, etc, is sent to
students via the Birkbeck e-mail system, as is information about associated events that
may be of interest. You may nominate an email via your “My Studies” Student Portal. If
you encounter any difficulty with this process please visit the MyBirkbeck Helpdesk in
the main Malet Street building. Email is the normal means of communication in the
School of Arts.
Location
The School of Arts is housed at 43 Gordon Square, where you will find the
Administrative Office and individual staff offices. Teaching often takes place in our
building, but your lectures may be held in any of the University of London or University
College London buildings. Pigeonholes for communications with students are located at
43 Gordon Square, and should be checked frequently. During term time the Gordon
Square entrance is staffed from 8.00am to 9.00pm, Monday to Friday. Urgent
messages outside these times can be left at the Malet Street reception desk, which is
open until 10.00pm.
The Administrative Office
The School of Arts student advice desk is located in the foyer of 43 Gordon Square,
and is open during term time from 4.00pm to 6.00pm Monday to Thursday until week 6
in the Autumn term, and from 5.00pm to 6.00pm thereafter. Outside these hours, please
contact your administrator by phone or e-mail to discuss your query or to book an
appointment. 43 Gordon Square is open between 9.00am and 5.00pm on Saturdays
during term time for access to student pigeonholes and coursework delivery.
Moodle (Birkbeck’s Virtual Learning Environment Platform)
You will be expected, throughout your studies, to submit relevant coursework through
Moodle. You will need your Birkbeck College username and password in order to gain
access to Moodle. Your username and password are created by ITS and all enrolled
students will receive them. You cannot access this system if you are not enrolled. If you
do not have your username and password, please contact ITS Reception in the main
Malet Street building or by e-mail at [email protected]. If you have difficulty
using Moodle, please contact/visit the ITS Help Desk where they can walk you through
the process.
Books: to buy or borrow?
Throughout your degree you will be given reading lists, which will include both essential
texts forming the basis of lectures and seminars, and suggestions for wider reading.
The distinction between these two categories is clearly marked in this booklet. The first
you will normally be expected to buy (particular versions or editions are specified in
some cases) or photocopy from the short loan collection in Birkbeck Library. If you have
trouble obtaining the recommended edition, or already own an alternative, a substitute
will often be acceptable; consult the lecturer concerned if you are in any doubt. If you
intend to rely on libraries, bear in mind that many other students will inevitably need the
books at exactly the same time as you do. It is your responsibility to obtain these books
in time for the classes. If you do find that a book has become unobtainable for any
reason, please let the lecturer know as soon as possible.
7
Module Choices
You will be contacted by your Department with regard to the modules you would like to
take for the coming year. Please do not delay in returning your choices as modules are
allocated first by year of study and then by date of submission. Students are grouped
by year with the earliest submission gaining highest priority within that year. There is a
strict deadline in place from the College that is enforced within the School of Arts. This
date will be made clear to you on your module choice forms. Students submitting after
this date will have modules allocated to them based on degree requirements.
8
Core Courses
Romantic Objects
Module Code: AREN075S7
Monday, 6.00-7.20pm, Autumn Term
Module Convenor: Dr Luisa Calè
Learning Objectives and Aims
historical and mutisensorial grasp of Romantic period culture
indepth knowledge of the modes of production, collecting, and exhibiting of
Romantic objects
a historical and critical engagement with Romantic disciplines, practices, and
institutions engaging with Romantic objects
Romantic ekphrasis within classical and Romantic traditions.
techniques of writing about objects situated in specific contexts of reading,
viewing, and practice.
literary genres and modes of address to objects and their audiences
research methods for the study of Romantic period objects
Module Description
Romantic objects articulate a multisensorial aesthetic in which reading, viewing, and
collecting are overlapping and complementary creative practices. This module situates
the literary in a wider range of cultural phenomena. Our focus on objects goes against
attempts to privilege solitary reading and solitary encounters with art forms isolated
from the public sphere. Our aim to restore cultural forms in the domain of practice in
which the Romantics created and encountered them.
The period from 1750 to 1850 marks the rise of the museum, the gallery, the zoo and a
range of other sites and institutions as arenas for public culture (the British Museum
opens in 1753, the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1799, the National
Gallery in 1824, the Zoological Gardens in 1828 to specialists and 1847 to the general
public – and this is to name but a few). The rise of consumer culture, with the
development of retail outlets and the wider circulation of consumer goods, and more
publicized forms of collecting opened up new sites of cultural exchange for a new
reading and viewing public.
‘Romantic Objects’ will introduce works produced in a variety of genres and media. You
will work on a wide range of texts, literary, artistic, scientific – some of them shaped by
a disciplinary practice, some adisciplinary, some deliberately resisting established
practices and forms. You will analyse poems, paintings, and more canonical forms
alongside more unusual Romantic objects such as stuffed birds, death masks,
monuments and souvenirs in Romantic period museums, environments, and displays,
including the British Museum, the John Soane’s Museum, William Bullock’s London
Museum and Pantherion. You will be introduced to modes of production, collecting,
display, and circulation of objects. You will acquire methodologies for identifying,
researching, talking, and writing about objects.
Each class juxtaposes an object in a specific domain of practice with a literary text, a
particular disciplinary angle, and a selection of key secondary readings.
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The assessment combines an academic essay with a catalogue entry, which trains
students to write for the museum and culture industry sector.
Assessment
Assignment
Catalogue Entry
Assessed Essay
Description
1,500-2,000 words
4,500 Words
Weighting
10%
90%
Essential Texts
In preparation for the module it is recommended that you familiarize yourselves with
approaches to objects anthologized inThe Object Reader, ed. by Fiona Candlin and
Raiford Guins (London: Routledge, 2009); Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things (Chicago,
2012). A good introduction to the Romantic period is Marilyn Butler’s engaging
Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Backgrond 1760-1830
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). For specific points of information, you can
consult An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. by Ian McCalman (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001). On Romantic objects and memorialization, a good
introductory reading is Nicola Watson’s The Literary Tourist (Palgrave, 2006). On
literary form in the Romantic Period, you may wish to consult David Duff, Romanticism
and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Week 1: Romantic Ekphrasis & The Materialities of Writing
Object in Focus: The Medusa by a Flemish Artist, once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci,
Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Percy B. Shelley, ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery’
(1824), online edition available through Romantic Circles website:
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/mforum.html (it includes an annotated
edition of the poem and secondary readings)
W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 91:3
(Summer 1992), 695-719, rpt online via the Romantic Circles website above
Sophie Thomas, ‘Ekphrasis and Terror: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria’, in
Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture, ed.
L. Calè and P. di Bello (Palgrave 2009)
Week 2: Romantic Objects in Theory
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ (1828), approved edition on
moodle
Extracts from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, on moodle or distributed in class
Critical Inquiry, 28:1 (2001), special issue on Thing Theory, edited by Bill Brown
(JSTOR), see especially essays by Bill Brown, Jonathan Lamb, W.J.T.Mitchell
http://ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/login?url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/i257808
10
Week 3: The Gothic
Object in Focus: Horace Walpole’s ‘toything’ house at Strawberry Hill
Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection:(http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/);
key in ‘Description of Strawberry Hill’ for a rich collection of prints and extra-illustrations
in Horace Walpole and Richard Bull’s extra-illustrated copies of A Description of the
Villa of Horace Walpole ... at Strawberry Hill (1784)
Readings:
[Horace Walpole], The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshall, Gent.
From the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto (1764)
Secondary Readings:
Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, ed. by Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Ruth Mack, ‘Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History’, English Literary
History, 75:2 (2008), 367-387, JSTOR.
E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995)
Week 4: Objects of Sensibility
Object in focus: Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘Maria, from Sterne’ 1777
Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 1768 (Oxford World Classics)
Secondary readings:
W.B. Gerard, Lawrence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Ashgate, 2006), chapter 5
J. Egerton, Wright of Derby (Tate catalogue, 1990), catalogue 52, pp.106-7
J.Chandler, ‘The languages of sentiment’, Textual Practice, 22:1 (2008), 21-39
J.Chandler, An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and
Cinema (Chicago, 2013)
M.Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental
Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, Clarendon, 1990)
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago, 1992)
Week 5: Paper Foliage
Object in focus: Mary Delany’s ‘Paper Mosaics’, British Museum, Enlightenment Gallery
and Department of Prints and Drawings
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx
Readings:
William Blake, The Book of Thel (1789)
Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants (London: Johnson, 1789), extracts
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Secondary Readings:
Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009)
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Vases
Objects in focus:
China Fish Bowl, formerly at Strawberry Hill
The Townley Vase, Townley Collection;
The Portland Vase, Portland Museum, currently both at the British Museum
Readings:
Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’, Poems, 1753 (pics of the
illustrated edition can be viewed at:
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791), excerpt
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, online through Romantic Circles
Secondary Readings:
Viccy Coltman, ‘Sir William Hamilton’s Vase Publications (1766-1776): A Case Study in
the Reproduction and Dissemination of Antiquity’, Journal of Design History (2001)
Stacey Sloboda, ‘Displaying Materials: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of
Portland’s Museum’, Eighteenth-Century Studies (2010)
Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming)
Week 8: Ruins
Objects in Focus: The Elgin Marbles, as installed in the British Museum; copies of the
Elgin Marbles at the John Soane’s Museum
Readings:
Sir John Soane, ‘Crude Hints towards an History of my House in L I Fields’ (1812)
William Hazlitt, ‘The Elgin Marbles’ (1822)
John Keats, ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’
P.B.Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’
Secondary Readings:
Viccy Coltman, ‘Representation, Replication and Collecting in Charles Townley’s Late
Eighteenth-Century Library’, Art History (2006)
Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760
(2009)
Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Chicago,
2006)
Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of
Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
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Sophie Thomas, ‘Assembling History: Fragments and Ruins’, European Romantic
Review, 14:2 (2003)
Grant Scott, ‘The Elgin Marbles Sonnet in its Historical and Generic Contexts, KeatsShelley Journal, 39 (1990), 123-50.
Grant Scott, ‘Ekphrasis and the Picture Gallery’, in Advances in Visual Semiotics, ed.
Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (New York and Berlin: W. De
Gruyter, 1995), pp. 403-421
Week 9: Albums (LC)
Object in focus: Mrs Birkbeck’s Album, Birkbeck College Library
Readings:
Mrs Birkbeck’s Album
http://birkbeck.lunaimaging.com:8180/luna/servlet/detail/BIRKBECKBCM~15~15~
56317~110283:Mrs-Birkbeck-s-Diary
Secondary Readings:
Patrizia di Bello, 'Mrs Birkbeck's Album: the Hand-Written and the Printed in Early
Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, 1 (2005), www.19.bbk.ac.uk
Hunt, Leigh, ‘Pocket-Books and Keepsakes’, The Keepsake (London: Hurst, Chance &
Cp., 1828), pp. 4-5.
Wilson, John, ‘Monologue, or Soliloquy on the Annuals’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 26 (December 1829), 949–51.
Thackeray, William, "A Word on the Annuals" (Fraser's Magazine, December 1837),
"The Annuals" (The Times, 2 November 1838) and "Our Annual Execution"
(Fraser's Magazine, January 1839)
Week 10: Birds (LC)
Object in focus: The Hummingbird Cabinet, London, Natural History Museum.
Readings:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem written in April,
1798’, Lyrical Ballads (Bristol: Cottle, 1798), pp. 63-69, electronic facsimile
available at Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/html/Lb98-l.html.
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, Annals of the Fine Arts (July 1819)
Percy Shelley, To a Skylark
William Bullock, A Companion to the London Museum and Pantherion (London, 1812),
pp. 50-52.
Secondary Readings:
Bullock, William, A concise and easy method of preserving objects of natural history:
13
intended for the use of sportsmen, travellers, and others; to enable them to
prepare and preserve such curious and rare articles, 2nd edn (London: printed for
the proprietor, 1818)
Kaeppeler, Adrienne, Holophusicon: The Leverian Museum. An Eighteenth-Century
English Institution of Science, Curiosity, and Art (Altenstadt: ZKF Publishers,
2011)
Pascoe, Judith, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic
Collectors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Pearce, Susan, ‘William Bullock: Collections and Exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall,
London, 1816-25’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20:1 (2008), 17-35
Ritvo, Harriet, The Platypus and the Mermaid and other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Special Issue on Eighteenth-Century Animals, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies
(2010)
Week 11: material culture of memory: monuments, locks of hair, death masks
(LC)
Object in focus: Keats’ House
Reading: Shelley, ‘Adonais’
Secondary Readings:
Philip Connell, ‘Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of the
Literary Monument’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38:4 (2005), 557-85
Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist (Palgrave, 2006)
Ernst Benkard, Undying Faces A Collection of Death Masks, trans. Margaret M. Green
(London: Hogarth Press, 1929)
Rune Fredericksen and Eckart Marchand, eds, Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and
Displaying from Classical Antiquiry to the Present (Brill 2012).
Peter Malone, ‘Keats’s ‘Posthumous Existence’ in Plaster’, Keats-Shelley Review , 26:2
(September 2012), 125-35
Brendan Corcoran, ‘Keats’s Death: Towards a Posthumous Poetics’, Studies in
Romanticism, 48 (Summer 2009)
James Heffernan, ‘Adonais: Shelley’s Consumption of Keats’, Studies in Romanticism,
23:3 (Fall 1984), 295-315.
Grant Scott, ‘Writing Keats’s Last Days: Severn, Sharp, and Romantic Biography’,
Studies in Romanticism, 42:1 (Spring 2003), 2-26.
Mark Merritt, ‘The Politics of Literary Biography in Charles Brown’s Life of John Keats’,
Studies in Romanticism, 44:2 (Summer 2005), 207-238.
‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, IV’, Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1818), available
through wikipedia
Ayumi Mizukoshi, Keats, Hunt, and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Palgrave, 2001)
14
Romantic Feelings
Tuesday, 7.40-9.00pm Spring Term
Module Convenor: Dr Emily Senior
Demonstrate a historical grasp of Romantic-period culture
A multidisciplinary approach to the imagination, and to considering different Romantic mode
presenting the impressions of the senses to the mind
Think about the specific ways in which different literary genres and different media cons
feelings and address their audiences
Historicize the role and representations of feeling
Demonstrate a command of literary, philosophical, and political discussions of feelings in
Romantic Period
Identify different constructions of the Romantic through the ways they negotiate the physiolo
the aesthetic
Identify the vocabulary which articulates the place of feeling and the physiology of the aesthe
Identify Romantic disciplines, practices, and institutions engaging with Romantic feelings
Historicize disciplinary practices and understand the implications of disciplinary approach
feelings
Identify appropriate research methods for the study of Romantic feelings
Module Description
Romanticism is often associated with an interiorization of the imagination—the move from associat
to idealist accounts of the imagination and the role of a Kantian 'free play of the faculties' as a guara
of an autonomous aesthetic sphere not determined by disciplines or taxonomies of objects, no
morality, self-interest, or the unpredictable and multifarious domain of sense impressions. This mo
contextualizes disembodied notions of reading and purified notions of viewing as responses to
widening body of the public, which some thought less educated and therefore less capab
restraining bodily inclinations in the exercise of aesthetic practice, be it reading or looking at v
objects in a dizzying world of public spectacle much attached to the pleasures of sensation. This mo
is complementary to the 'Romantic Objects' core: while both modules together offer ways of thin
about the materiality of culture and experience, 'Romantic Feelings' focuses on the material
perception and the role of the senses in the production of culture and subjectivity. Positing a fo
subjective participation theorized by Smith's notion of sympathy and impartial spectatorship, a focu
feelings offers a new way of analysing history through the forms in which it 'came home' to the re
and viewer: how the Terror, for instance, was witnessed by Helen Maria Williams in first person
then vicariously by her readers; how a feeling that denoted a physical response would becom
historiographical term for a period.
Each class is structured around a specific feeling or cluster of feelings.
15
Assessment
Assignment
Critical
Bibliography
Assessed Essay
Description
Weighting
1,500-2,000 Words 0%
5,000 Words
100%
Texts to read in preparation for the course:
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is the ideal novel to read over the summer in order
to start thinking about Romantic feelings. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would also be a
great introduction to thinking about how the act of reading shapes effects of feeling, and
how the monster tests the limits of sympathy. To get started on the module’s specific
reading list, it is advisable to read Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (Oxford University
Press) and Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, ed. Greg Dart (Carcanet, 2008). It would also be a
good idea to read some Wordsworth and Keats’s Odes (the best editions to buy are
those of Oxford World Classics).
Useful advance secondary reading would be:
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
Cohen, Margaret, ‘Sentimental Communities’, in The Literary Channel (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 106-48.
Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Marshall, David, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
1. Introduction and the Sublime (Dr. David McAllister)
This session will introduce two major traditions and texts on the sublime, focusing on
Edmund Burke's physiological sublime and the Kantian Analytic of the Sublime as
explorations of the possibilities and limitations of modes of feeling. Seminar discussion
will focus on these texts, as well as passages from Wordsworth’s Prelude Book VI and
Turner’s painting of Hannibal Crossing the Alps.
Reading:
Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,
ed. by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) [extract on Moodle].
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VI.
Further Reading:
Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16
Immanuel Kant, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Critique of the Power of Judgement (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 128-59.
Monk, Samuel, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England
(Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1960).
Shaw, Philip, The Sublime (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006).
‘The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations’, special issue of New Literary History,
16:2 (1985), access through JSTOR.
Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
2. Grief (Dr. David McAllister)
This session will focus on the expression of grief in the Romantic period, its persistent
associations with tangible material remains, conceptions of its value to the feeling
subject and theorizations of its circulation through culture.
Primary texts:
William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres (1809)
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) [Extract on Moodle]
William Wordsworth, ‘Distressful gift! This Book receives’; ‘I Only looked for Pain and
Grief’; ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ [on Moodle]
Secondary Reading:
Ildiko Csengei, ‘Godwin’s Case: Melancholy Mourning in the “Empire of Feeling”’,
Studies in Romanticism, 48.3 (2009), 491-519
Mary Jacobus, ‘“Distressful gift”: Talking to the Dead’, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.2
(2007), 393-418
Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany, NY.:
SUNY Press, 2004)
Paul Westover, ‘William Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’,
Studies in Romanticism, 48.2 (2009), 299-319
Julie Carlson, ‘Fancy’s History’, European Romantic Review, 14.2 (2003), 163-176
Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the
Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)
3. Sympathy and the Sentimental
This session will explore the history and literary dimensions of sympathy and sentiment,
with discussion focusing on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.
Reading:
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ‘Part I: Of the Propriety of Action,
Consisting of Three Sections’ and Part III Of the Foundation of Our Judgements
Concerning Our Own Sentiments and Conduct, and the Sense of Duty’, in Theory of
Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), or online at:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1340&Itemid=29
9.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768).
17
Further Reading:
Bell, Michael, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Csengei, Ildiko, ‘I Will Not Weep’: Reading through the Tears of Henry Mackenzie’s
Man of Feeling’, Modern Language Review, 103:4 (October 2008), 952-68.
Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: race, gender and commerce in the
sentimental novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Ellison, Julie, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1999).
Festa, Lynn, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006).
Goring, Paul, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Hume, David, Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40).
Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace: A Sketch (1795), in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by
H.S.Riess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling (1771).
Schiller, Friedrich, ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1794-5).
Terada, Rei, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
4. Indolence, Melancholy, Nostalgia
This session traces the varied forms of Romantic melancholy and nostalgia associated
with a longing for home, being out of place, or a sense of belatedness, moving from
medical taxonomy to psychological state to aesthetic discourse, and placing melancholy
and nostalgia in the wider social contexts of empire, war, nationalism, and revolution.
Reading:
John Keats, Odes to Indolence and Melancholy (1819).
William Wordsworth, ‘The Brothers’, in Lyrical Ballads (1800).
William Cullen, Nosology, or a Systematic Arrangement of Diseases (1769), extract on
Moodle.
Further Reading:
Batten, Guin, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in
English Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
Bewell, Alan, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999).
Bewell, Alan, ‘John Clare and the Ghosts of Natures Past’, in Nineteenth-Century
Literature, 65: 4 (March 2011), 548-78.
De Quincey, Thomas, ‘The pains of opium’, in The Confessions of an English Opium
Eater (1821), ed. by Grevel Lindop (Oxford World Classics, 1985, 1996).
18
Favret, Mary, Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton
Manning, Peter (ed.), ‘Nostalgia, Melancholy, Anxiety: Discursive Mobility and the
Circulation of Bodies’, special issue of Studies in Romanticism, 49:2 (Summer 2010)
(see especially Kevis Goodman’s essay in this volume: ‘“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia,
Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading’).
5. Joy, Sadness and Despair
This class will examine a range of poems from Blake’s Infant Joy to Wordsworth’s
Immortality Ode, and explore different ways of reading them by reference to different
contexts, from infant joy (Blake), to a ‘dialectics of happiness’, which articulates joy in
relation to indolence and dejection (Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Resolution and
Independence’, and ‘Stanzas’, and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’), and also think
about how this dialectic articulates political notions of joy in particular moments in the
Revolutionary Period (Ode: Intimations of Immortality), which will also be an occasion to
think about the importance of dates and different versions (Tintern Abbey, Ode:
Intimations). The session will also explore the apparently opposite feeling of despair,
examining the pre-history of what is now called ‘depression’ and recuperating 'dejection'
and 'despair' in their linguistic contexts, as well as the historical specificity of their
physiological and psychological implications.
Reading:
William Blake, ‘Infant
www.blakearchive.org.
Joy’,
Songs
of
Innocence
(1789),
available
at
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802).
William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), ‘Stanzas Written in my
Pocket-Copy of Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence”’ (1802), ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1804/1815).
Thomas Pfau, ‘Introduction’, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy,
1790-1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Further Reading:
Dolan, Elizabeth A., Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Johnson, Claudia L., Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the
1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Potkay, Adam, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge:
CUP, 2007).
McMahon, Darrin, Happiness: A History (New York, 2006).
Smith, Charlotte, ‘On Being Cautioned Against Walking on a Headland Overlooking the
Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic’ (1784).
Vickers, Neil, Coleridge and the Doctors, 1795-1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004).
19
Wordsworth, William, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, 13 July 1798’,
‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800).
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary: A Fiction (1788).
6. Reading week
7. Ecstasy and Enthusiasm: Liturgy, The Carnivalesque, The Millenarian, and the
Revolutionary Public Sphere.
Reading:
William Blake, Milton.
William Hogarth, ‘Enthusiasm Delineated’ (1759).
Further Reading:
Guest, Harriet, A Form Sound of Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Hawes, Clement, Mania and Literary Style (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
Klein, Lawrence E. and Anthony La Vopa, ‘Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe,
1650-1850’, special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, 60: 1-2 (1998).
Matthews, Susan, ‘“Happy Copulation”: Blake, visual enthusiasm and gallery culture’,
Romanticism on the Net, Vol. 46 (May 2007).
Mee, Jon, Dangerous Enthusiasm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Mee, Jon, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003).
Smart, Christopher, ‘Jubilate Agno’, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. by
Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), or on LION.
8. Terror and Horror (Dr. Silke Arnold-de Simine)
This week will explore terror and horror and focus on Ann Radcliffe's 'On the
Supernatural in Poetry' (1826) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew
Lewis’s gothic classic The Monk (1796).
Reading:
Ann Radcliffe, 'On the Supernatural in Poetry', New Monthly Magazine 16/1 (1826),
145-152 [on Moodle]
Ann Radcliffe,The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) [extracts on Moodle]
M.G. Lewis, The Monk (1796) [extracts on Moodle]
9. Hatred and Anger This session will cover representations of revolutionary crowds,
key moments of the French Revolution such as Edmund Burke’s description of the
fisherwomen of Versailles in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790),
representations of the ‘enragés’, the Peterloo massacre in Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’,
as well as more abstract pieces such as William Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Pleasures of
Hating’ (1826).
20
Reading:
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) [extracts on Moodle]
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘England in 1819’.
William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasures of Hating' (1826).
Further reading:
Stauffer, Andrew, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press,
2005).
Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of
Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
10. Love
Percy Bysshe Shelley, fragment ‘on love’.
William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion (1823) [in Complete Works of
William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: Dent, 1920), vol. 9, or full view through Google
Books. The best edition to buy is Liber Amoris and related writings, ed. by Gregory Dart
(Carcanet, 2008)]
Further Reading:
Barnard, John, ‘Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion (1823): Conversations
and the Statue’, in Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead, eds, Translating Life: Studies in
Transpositional Aesthetics (Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 181-99.
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1
(1913-1926), ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael William Jennings (Harvard University
Press, 2004).
Butler, Marilyn, ‘Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris and Romantic Satire’, Yearbook of English
Studies, 14 (1984), 209-25.
Goethe, Wolfgang von, Elective Affinities (1808), trans. David Constantine (Oxford
World Classics, 1999); Roman Elegies (project gutenberg online has the best
translation).
Henderson, Andrea, ‘Practicing Politics in the Comforts of Home’, Romanticism and the
Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 171-223.
11. Conclusions and student presentations
In this final week we will reflect on the different models of passions, affections,
sentiments, feelings and emotions that we have discussed. This week will also offer
students the opportunity to bring in an example of ‘Romantic Feeling’—an image, object
or text they are interested in—and present it to the group, offering an analysis of it in the
context of our discussions on the module.
21
Study Skills
Term 1
Week 1 Monday 30 Sept, 6.00-7.30 (LC) Induction
Week 1 Monday 30 Sept, 7.30-9.00 (LC) Research and Writing Skills (new
entrants only)
Week 2 Monday 7 Oct, 7.30-9.00 pm (Subject Librarian) Using the Library:
Electronic resources
Deadline for submission: Monday 25 November, 12 noon
Week 4 Wednesday 23 Oct, 6.00-7.20 pm (LC): The Catalogue Entry (for
Romantic Objects module).
In preparation for this workshop, examine catalogue entries related to Romantic
objects, and bring two examples to the session to share in the discussion. More will
be available for analysis in class.
Reading:
Pearce, Susan, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections (London: Routledge,
1994), 127-9 (moodle).
Further Reading:
Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A.
Appadurai, ed., The Social Lives of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 3-61.
Ritvo, Harriet, The Playtypus and the Mermaid and other figments of the classifying
imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Week 4 Wednesday 23 Oct, 7.40-9.00 The Romantic Museum (all):
In preparation for this workshop,
1. visit one of the following museums:
John Soane Museum, Lincoln Inn’s Fields, London
Hunterian Museum, Lincoln Inn’s Fields, London
Elgin Marbles Room, British Museum, London
National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London
2. choose an object from the Romantic period, collected during the romantic period,
or written about during the Romantic period, and think about what it tells you
about the Romantic Museum as a cultural phenomenon
Week 9 Wednesday 27 Nov, 7.40-9.00 (LC): How to write a Dissertation 1: title
and abstract (compulsory for FT & 2nd year PT)
Dissertation Form Deadline: Friday 31st January 2014(FT and 2nd-year PT only)
22
Term 2
Week 4 Tuesday 28 January (ES): How to Write a Critical Bibliography (for
Romantic Feelings module, but all welcome)
Deadline for submission of Critical Bibliography coursework: Week 8, Monday
24th February, 12 noon.
Week 7 Tuesday 18 Feb, 7.40-9.00 (ES): Online Research
Week 8 Wednesday 26 Feb, 7.40-9.00 (LC): How to deliver a Research
Presentation
Term 3
Dissertation workshops (compulsory for full timers and second year part-time students)
Week 1 Monday 28 April, 6.00-7.20 Dissertation Workshop 2: Writing Introductions
Week 2 Wednesday 7 May, 7.40-9.00 Dissertation Workshop 3: Writing Conclusions
Research Project Presentations
Week 3 Monday 12 May, 6.00-7.20 Research project presentations
Week 3 Wednesday 14 May, 6.00-7.20 Research project presentations
About research project presentation: This exercise trains you to give an oral
presentation, work out the right pitch and scope and keep to time (max 15 mins), try out
an idea in front of a friendly public, receive and respond to feedback on the spot, get a
sense of the range of topics approaches and methods, ask questions and respond to
someone else's ideas.
23
Option Modules
HICL025S7
(Autumn Term opened as
option to our full-timers)
Wednesdays 6:00-9:00pm
AREN166S7
(Autumn Term opened as
option to our full-timers)
Thursdays, 6:00-7:30pm
Colonialism and Modernity – Emily Senior
AREN122S7
Mondays, 7.40-9.00pm
The Book Unbound – Luisa Calè
ENHU123S7
Monday, 6.00-7.30pm
Death In Victorian Culture – David McAllister
AREN119S7
Monday - 7:30-9:00pm
Victorian Emotions – Carolyn Burdett
AREN002S7
Tuesday - 6:00-7:30pm
History of Art options will also be on offer, details will be
provided as soon as they become available.
24
Option Modules
(MA Victorian Autumn Core offered to MA Romantic Studies Full-timers)
Module Code HICL025S7
Autumn Term: Wednesdays 6:00-9:00pm
Module Convenors: Dr Nicola Bown, Dr David McAllister, Dr Heather
Tilley
This core course consists of a mixture of master classes, seminars and workshops.
Seminars on Victorian society, history, political economy, science and novels are followed
by a series of workshops designed to introduce you to the research skills required to
complete a postgraduate degree in Victorian Studies. These workshops are absolutely vital
to the course. Your first piece of coursework will require you to choose a book from the
Farrer collection to write a historical-bibliographic essay on it (to be submitted on Week 7),
in week 11 the seminar will be followed by an end of term drinks party.
ASSESSMENT: There will be two pieces of assessed work for this course.
1) Bibliographic exercise (1,500 words), due Monday 11 November. This is a
compulsory piece of work but is zero-weighted.
2) Essay on a topic of your choice arising from the course (3,500 words), due
Monday 6 January 2014 (100%).
PLEASE NOTE: You need to read all the Primary Reading listed. Secondary Reading
lists are intended to start you off on an individual reading programme. Naturally, where
the list is lengthy we do not expect you to read all the texts listed: try to look at one or
two of the texts to orientate yourselves, preferably in advance of the seminar.
Except where indicated, Primary Reading will be available on Moodle for you to print out. You
will need copies of the two novels.
Week One: INDUCTION MEETING, followed by 7.40pm-9pm: Victorian Studies
Masterclass by Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Arts.
Week Two: MACAULAY AND REFORM
6pm-7.30pm: Seminars (Two Groups: Nicola Bown and David McAllister)
Required Reading
Thomas Babington Macaulay, extracts from The History of England; speeches on
parliamentary reform in Parliamentary Debates Vol. 4, 3rd Series, columns 773-83, and Vol. 9,
3rd Series, columns 378-92.
25
Secondary Reading
J. Hamburger, Macaulay and the Whig Tradition, Chicago IL, 1976
B. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of a Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review 18021832, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985
J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1993
P. Ghosh, ‘Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, English Historical Review, 112,
1997, pp.358-95
A. Burns and J. Innes eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform, Britain 1780-1850, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2003 esp. chapters 1-3
C. Hall, “At Home With History: Macaulay and The History of England”, in C. Hall and S. Rose
eds, At Home with the Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006
B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2006
W. Thomas, The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform
(Oxford, 2000)
7.30-9pm: -- Farrer Library Workshop 1: Researching Victorian Print Culture
Week Three: THE POOR LAWS
Required Reading
F.B. Head, ‘English Charity’, Quarterly Review 53 (1835), 473-539.
[Douglas Jerrold], ‘The “Milk” of Poor-Law Kindness’, Punch 4 (1843), 46-7.
Indicative Secondary Reading
Brundage, Anthony, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and
Implementation, 1832-39 (Hutchinson, 1978)
Cody, Lisa Forman, ‘The Politics of Illegitimacy in the Age of Reform: Women, Reproduction
and Political Economy in England’s New Poor Law of 1834’, Journal of Women’s History, 11.4
(Winter 2000)
Driver, Felix, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834-1884 (Cambridge
University Press, 1983)
Edsall, Nicholas C., The Anti-PoorLaw Movement, 1834-44 (Manchester University Press,
1971)
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber
and Faber, 1984).
Winch, Donald, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain,
1750-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7.30pm-9.00pm: Farrer Library Workshop 2: ‘Digital Victorians’
Week Four: Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Primary Reading
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848). Any scholarly edition of the text will do. Shirley
Foster’s 2006 Oxford World’s Classics edition has a useful introduction.
Secondary Reading
Dentith, Simon, ‘Generic Diversity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, Gaskell Society Journ1
(1997), 43-54.
Guest, Harriet, ‘The Deep Romance of Manchester: Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, in K.D.M. Snell
(ed.),
26
The Regional novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 79-98.
Hotz, Mary Elizabeth, ‘A Grave with No Name: Representations of Death in Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, Nineteenth Century Studies 15 (2001), 38-56.
Matus, Jill, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007). See especially the chapters by Matus and Deirdre D’Albertis.
Recchio, Thomas, ‘Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton’.
Studies in the Novel 43.3 (2011), 289-305.
Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958).
Williams’s brief discussion of the novel in this classic text has been enormously
influential.
Zemka, Sue, ‘Brief Encounters: Street Scenes in Gaskell’s Manchester’ ELH 76.3 (2009), 783819.
7.40pm-9pm: Farrer Library Workshop 3: Researching Victorian Visual Culture
Week Five: EVANGELICALISM AND ITS CULTURE
Primary Reading
William Blaikie, extract from The Family, Its Scriptural Ideal and Its Modern Assailants, London:
Religious Tract Society, 1888, (extract repr in Religion in Victorian Britain ed. G. Parsons, Vol
3: Sources ( Manchester: Manchester University Press/Open University, 1988), pp. 200-206)
John Angell James, extract from The Anxious Enquirer After Salvation Directed and
Encouraged, London: Religious Tract Society, 1834 (extract repr in Religion in Victorian
Britain ed. G. Parsons, Vol 3: Sources ( Manchester: Manchester University Press/Open
University, 1988), pp. 228-232)
John Angell James, extract from The Principles of Dissent and the Duties of Dissenters: A
Pastor’s Address to his People, London, Birmingham, 1834 (extract repr in Religion in
Victorian Britain ed. G. Parsons, Vol 3: Sources ( Manchester: Manchester University
Press/Open University, 1988), pp. 132-134)
Secondary Reading
Bebbington, DW, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989
Ditchfield, DM The Evangelical Revival, London: UCL Press, 1998
Englander, D, ‘The world and the word: evangelicalism and the Victorian city’, , in Religion in
Victorian Britain, Vol 2: Controversies ed. G Parsons, Manchester: Manchester
University Press/Open University, 1988, pp. 14-38.
Fyfe, Aileen, Science and Salvation: Evangelical popular science publishing in Victorian
Britain, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004
Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic
thought 1785-1865, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1988
Jay, Elisabeth, Religion of the Heart: Anglican evangelicalism and the nineteenth-century
novel, Oxford: Clarendon, 1979
Lewis, Donald M, Lighten their Darkness: the evangelical mission to working class London
1828-1860, New York: Greenwood Press, 1986
Parsons, Gerald, ‘Reform, revival, realignment: the experience of Victorian Anglicanism’ in
Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol 1: Traditions ed. G Parsons, Manchester: Manchester
University Press/Open University, 1988, pp. 14-66.
27
--------------------- ‘From dissenters to free churchmen: the transitions of Victorian
nonconformity’, in Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol 1: Traditions ed. G Parsons,
Manchester: Manchester University Press/Open University, 1988, pp. 67-116.
Rosman, Doreen M, Evangelicals and Culture, London: Croom Helm, 1984
Tolley, Christopher, Domestic Biography: The legacy of evangelicalism in four
nineteenth-century families, Oxford: Clarendon, 1997
7.40pm-9pm: NO CLASS
Week Six: READING WEEK
Week Seven: CARLYLE, HISTORY AND PROGRESS
6pm-7.30pm: Seminars (Two Groups: David McAllister and Heather Tilley)
Primary Reading:
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), excerpts
Secondary Reading:
Le Quesne, AL, Carlyle Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (This book was also reprinted
as part of Victorian Thinkers)
Culler, A. Dwight, The Victorian Mirror of History, New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1985
Rosenberg, John D., Carlyle and the burden of history, Oxford :Clarendon,1985.
Vanden Bossche, Chris, Carlyle and the search for authority, Columbus :Ohio State University
Press,c1991.
K. J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (eds), Carlyle past and present :a collection of new essays,
London :Vision,c1976.
D.J. Trela and Rodger L. Tarr (eds), The critical response to Thomas Carlyle's major works,
Westport, Conn. ;London :Greenwood,1997.
Taylor, Jonathan, Science and omniscience in nineteenth-century literature, Brighton :Sussex
Academic,2007.
Ulrich, John M.. Signs of Their Times: History, Labor and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and
Disraeli. Athens, OH.: Ohio University Press, 2002.
---. “Thomas Carlyle, Richard Owen, and the Paleontological Articulation of the Past.” Journal
of Victorian Culture 11.1 (2006): 30-58.
Jules Paul Seigel (ed.), Thomas Carlyle :the critical heritage, London: Routledge,1995, c1971.
7.40pm-9pm: Farrer Library Workshop 4: Researching Victorian Material Culture
Week Eight: THE WOMAN QUESTION
6pm-7.20pm Seminars (Two Groups: David McAllister and Heather Tilley)
Required Reading:
Sarah Stickney Ellis, extract from The Wives of England, their relative duties, domestic
influence, and social obligations (London: Fisher and Son, 1843)
Harriet Taylor, ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, in M. Mulvey Roberts and T. Mizuta (eds), The
Disenfranchised: the Fight for the Suffrage (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993).
Indicative Secondary Reading
Caine, Barbara, English Feminism 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987; rev. edn, London: Routledge,
2002). See especially the introduction to the revised edition of this book.
28
Gleadle, Kathryn, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s
Rights Movement, 1831-51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
Rendall, Jane, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United
States, 1780-1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).
Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Virago, 1983).
Vickery, Amanda, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36 (1993), pp. 383-414.
7.40pm-9pm: Essay Writing Workshop (Nicola Bown & David McAllister).
Week Nine: GEOLOGY AND TIME
Primary Reading Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830), extracts
Secondary Reading
Martin Rudwick, Worlds before Adam :the reconstruction of geohistory in the age of reform,
Chicago and London :University of Chicago Press,2010.
-------------------- Lyell and Darwin, geologists :studies in the earth sciences in the age of
reform, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum,c2005.
James Secord, ‘Introduction’ to Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, London: Penguin, 1977
Stephen Jay Gould, Time's arrow, time's cycle :myth and metaphor in the discovery of
geological time, London: Penguin,1988.
Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: New Perspectives in the
History of Geology, British Society for the History of Science,1997.
Week Nine:
7.40pm-9pm: NO CLASS
Week Ten: Anthony Trollope, The Warden
6.00pm-7.20pm: Seminars (Two Groups: David McAllister and Heather Tilley)
Primary Reading Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855). Any scholarly edition of the text will
do.
Secondary Reading
Blumberg, Ilana M., '”Unnatural Self-Sacrifice”: Trollope's Ethic of Mutual Benefit’, NineteenthCentury Literature, 58:4 (2004), 506-46.
Bridgham, Elizabeth, ‘Victorian Fatherhood and Clerical Conscience: Crises of Paternal
Authority in Gaskell and Trollope’ , in Fathers in Victorian Fiction, ed. Natalie McKnight,
Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 63-91.
Dever, Carolyn and Lisa Niles (eds), The Cambridge companion to Anthony Trollope
Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Earle, Bo, ‘Policing and Performing Liberal Individuality in Anthony Trollope's The Warden’,
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 61:1 (2006), 1-31
Goodlad, Lauren M. E.: ‘Trollopian 'Foreign Policy': Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the
Mid-Victorian Global Imaginary’ , PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 124:2 (2009), 437-454.
Langford, Thomas A., ‘Trollope's Satire in The Warden’, Studies in the Novel, 19:4 (1987),
435-447.
McDermott, Jim, ‘New Womanly Man: Feminized Heroism and the Politics of Compromise in
The Warden’, VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal, 27 (1999), 71-90.
29
Maid, Barry M., ‘Trollope, Idealists, Reality, and Play’, VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal, 12
(1984),, 9-21.
Markwick, Margaret, Deborah Denenholz Morse and Regenia Gagnier (eds), The politics of
gender in Anthony Trollope's novels : new readings for the twenty-first century ,
Farnham and Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2009.
Meckier, Jerome, ‘The Cant of Reform: Trollope Rewrites Dickens in The Warden,’ Studies in
the Novel, 15:3 (1983), 202-223.
7.40 -9.00: MA Victorian Studies Meeting
with Student Reps
Week 11: THE GREAT EXHIBITION
Required Reading
Extracts 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 from J.M. Golby (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 18501890 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 1-6.
‘Some Moral Aspects of the Exhibition’, The Economist (17 May 1851), 532.
Charles Dickens and R.H. Horne, ‘The Great Exhibition and the Little One’,
Household Words 3 (5 July 1851), 356-60.
Visual Material
‘The Queen and Her Subjects’, Punch (3 May 1851).
‘The Classes and the Masses’, Punch (14 June 1851).
‘Specimens From Mr Punch’s Industrial Exhibition of 1850. To be Improved in 1851’.
Punch 18 (1850), 145.
‘Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace’, Punch (5 July 1851).
John Nash, stuffed elephant and howdah from India.
‘The Tunis Court’
John Tenniel, ‘The Happy Family in Hyde Park’, Punch (19 July 1851).
‘Cannibal Islanders’
Secondary Reading
Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Thomas Richards, ‘ The Great Exhibition of Things’, in The Commodity Culture of Victorian
England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1990), pp. 17-72.
Audrey Short, ‘Workers Under Glass’, Victorian Studies 10 (1966), pp. 193-202.Deborah
Wynne, ‘Responses to the 1851 Exhibition in Household Words’, Dickensian 97:3
(2001), 228-34.
Paul Young, ‘Economy, Empire, Extermination: The Christmas Pudding, the Crystal Palace
and the Narrative of Capitalist Progress’, Literature and History 14 (2005), 14-30.
Paul Young, ‘”Carbon, Mere Carbon”: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace and the Mission to
Make Sense of British India’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28 (2006).
7.40pm-9pm: Christmas Drinks Party
30
(MA Victorian Autumn Core offered to MA
Romantic Studies Full-timers)
Autumn Term: Thursdays, 6:00-7:30pm
Module Convenors: Dr Ana Vadillo, Dr Carolyn Burdett
Module Aims and Outcomes
Students will gain:
a series of key debates about the poor, women, nation, the English;
of modernisation was problematical and criticised by the Victorians.
which the mid to late Victorians investigate their changing world and consequent
transformations in subjectivity;
of study;
ary and secondary resources, and appropriate
use of them.
Other Information:
Students will need to have a copy of novels studied on the course. Other reading can be found
either in John Plunkett et al (eds), Victorian Literature: A Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012); to download through specified online sources; or posted on Blackboard.
Module Breakdown and Reading List
Week 1: Induction (no class)
Week 2: Philosophies and ideas
Extracts from Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill,
Walter Pater, Francis Herbert Bradley, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Sections 5.5-5.11 of Victorian Literature (pp. 133-49).
31
Week 3: Darwin, post-Darwinism and evolution
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (first edn 1871;
this edn 1874) Part III, chps 19-21. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html#descent [NB please ensure you use the
1874 edn]
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (The Romanes Lecture, 1893). Available
to download from Gutenberg at
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2940/pg2940.html [section II]
Week 4: Realism and the web of life
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2) [Any good edition]
Week 5: Gender and sexuality
Extracts from Samuel Smiles, Eliza Lynn Linton, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin,
Charles Darwin, Henry Maudsley, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Mona
Caird, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds
Sections3.3-3.11 of Victorian Literature (pp.78-97)
Week 6: Reading week
Week 7: Labour, art and value
John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, from The Stones of Venice, vol II (1853). Available to
download from Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30755/30755-h/30755h.htm#page151
William Morris, ‘Preface’ to ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Downloadable from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1892/ruskin.htm
Week 8: Modern living
James Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874/1880). Available to download from
Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1238/1238-h/1238-h.htm
Gustave Le Bon, ‘The Crowd’ . Available to download at
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/BonCrow.html
John Davidson, ‘Thirty Bob a Week’
Charles Dickens ‘The Signal Man’ (1866)
Secondary Reading:
Amy Levy, ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’ (1883) in the Broadview Victorian Poetry
and Poetic Studies 1138-1363
“Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat” by Louis and Auguste Lumiere (1895) or
London's Trafalgar Square (Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W. C. Crofts 1890)
32
Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867); and Charles Henry
Felix Routh, On Overwork and Premature Mental Decay: Its Treatment (1876): extracts
from Embodied Selves: an Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, eds Jenny
Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp., 297-300.
[Extracts on blackboard]
Week 9: Socialism and Marxism
Extracts from H.M.Hyndman, England for All, William Morris, 'Why I Became Socialist ',
G. B. Shaw, Fabian Tracts; extracts from eg Clarion.
Week 10: Darkest England
Booth, William, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: The Salvation Army,
1890) - read the preface and the first three chapters of part I
Secondary Reading
Booth, William, All About the Salvation Army (London: The Salvation Army, 1885) – it
would be equally helpful to examine other Salvation Army publications from the 1880s
and 1890s (such as the War Cry periodical).The British Library holds a lot of relevant
material.
Hattersley, Roy, Blood and Fire: The Story of William and Catherine Booth and their
Salvation Army (London: Little, Brown, 1999)
Inglis, K. S., Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London:
Routledge, 1963 – read chapter 5. (For more recent work on religion and the working
class, see Hugh Mcleod‘s work.)
Knight, Mark & Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An
Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) – read Chapter 5.
Law, John, Captain Lobe (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889) – republished as
Margaret Harkness, In Darkest London (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2003)
McLaughlin, Joseph, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle
to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) - read Chapter 4
(‗Colonizing the Urban Jungle: General Booth‘s In Darkest England the Way Out‘)
Walker, Pamela, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian
Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
Week 11: Empire and race
This week's work will be a student led session on the Boer War (1899-1902).
Preparation will be a mini research project, based upon sources including journalism,
literary responses, and contemporary analysis.
ASSESSMENT
1. Essay (5,000 words. 100% of total possible marks): This forms the main element of
assessment. Students are encouraged to develop their own essay question in consultation
with the tutor.
2. Students are expected to contribute to sessions throughout the module.
33
Colonialism and Modernity
Spring Term: Mondays, 7.40-9.00pm
Module Convenor: Dr Emily Senior
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries conjoined Europe, the Americas, Africa, and
Asia in a complex of social, political, cultural, and economic relationships. In the context
of such international transformation, this module invites students to rethink the
relationship between literature and colonialism in terms of intercultural encounter and
narratives of modernity. How did new global networks shape ideas about citizenship
and subjectivity, and national and racial difference? What forms of identity and society
did colonialism bring into being? How did colonial spaces—such as the plantation—
function as particular sites of ‘modernity’? How did travel writing and literature articulate
and shape the cultural and political concerns of empire? With reference to the
conceptual categories of Enlightenment, Romanticism and nation, this module situates
literary texts within the social context of imperial expansion and the development of
colonial cultures.
The module develops an interdisciplinary focus by working around key themes such as
scientific knowledge, travel, and the colonial gothic, and by reading literary texts in
conjunction with historical works. We will also draw on recent theoretical work in
postcolonial and world literature studies, in order to consider the idea of an international
or global literary space in the context of increased travel across national borders and
tensions between the local, national and global dimensions of colonial societies. We will
discuss the role of the literary in articulating the new social concerns of an enlarged
empire, and examine the production of ideas about different cultures, places and
peoples.
Texts marked ‘additional reading’ are optional. A further reading list will be available at
the start of the module.
Assessment
Assignment
Assessed Essay
Description
5,000 Words
Weighting
100%
1. Introduction: Colonial Modernities?
In this introductory seminar, we will explore what we mean by the term ‘colonial
modernity’ through excerpts from a range of Romantic and Victorian travellers and
authors (specific passages will be made available on Moodle).
Additional reading:
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009).
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990).
Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
34
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998).
2. Colonial Sensibilities
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798 edition)
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/readtxts.html
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), extract on Moodle.
Additional reading:
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), pp. 97-108.
Tim Fulford, ‘Slavery and Superstition in the Supernatural Poems’, The Cambridge
Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. Travel and Intercultural Encounter
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1798) (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002) extract on Moodle.
Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), ed. Judith Terry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), extract on Moodle.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature
and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), extract on Moodle.
Additional reading:
Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Ethics of Travel Writing 1770-1840 (Oxford: Oxford
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Anti-Conquest II: The Mystique of Reciprocity’, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 69-85.
4. Colonial Selfhood
John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted
Negroes of Surinam (1790) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), ed.
Richard Price and Sally Price, extracts on Moodle.
35
William Blake, selected engravings in Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (available at www.blakearchive.org, links on
Moodle).
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (A. Millar: London, 1759), extract on Moodle.
Additional reading:
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004).
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007).
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
5. Slavery, Autobiography and National Consciousness
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), ed. Vincent
Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998).
Paul De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 94, No.
5 (Dec. 1979), pp. 919-930 (on Moodle)
Additional reading:
Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenthcentury Question of Identity’, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 20, No. 3 (December 1999),
pp. 96-105.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1993), pp. 1-40
6. Reading Week
7. Romantic Pasts
William Beckford, Vathek (1786) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), ed. Pamela
Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), extract on
Moodle.
36
Edmund Burke, A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, and other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (1756), ed. David Womersley (London:
Penguin, 1998), extract on Moodle.
Additional reading:
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).
Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (eds) The Arabian Nights in Historical Context:
Between East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
8. Romantic Futures
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ (1812), Selected Poetry and
Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002),
on Moodle.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation’ (1792), Selected
Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview, 2002) on Moodle.
William Blake, America a Prophecy (1793) (available at www.blakearchive.org, link on
Moodle).
Additional reading:
Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), extract on Moodle.
9. Colonial Gothic I
Anonymous, Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), ed. Candace Ward and Tim Watson
(Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2010)
Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth
Century, Vol. 69. Report of the Lords of the Committee of the Council Appointed for the
Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations (London, 1789),
extract on Moodle.
Additional reading:
Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999).
Vincent Brown, ‘Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society’,
Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 24, No. 1 (April 2003), on Moodle.
37
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 69-83.
10. Colonial Gothic II
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. Sally Shuttleworth and Margaret Smith (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), extract on
Moodle.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
11. Colonial Modernity, Postcolonial Perspectives
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), extract on Moodle.
Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, extract on
Moodle.
38
The Book Unbound
Module Code: ENHU123S7
Monday, 6.00-7.30, Spring Term
Module Convenor: Dr Luisa Calè ([email protected])
By the end of the course, you will be able to:
Situate, historicize, and theorize books, their production, circulation, and
consumption, ca 1750-2010.
analyse the materiality of the book as an object and of book practices
under specific conditions of cultural production and across different media
Identify the conceptual framework informing an artist’s book or other kinds
of book practice.
Reconstruct the ‘lives’ of a book across different audiences, times, places,
modes of circulation.
Module Description
This MA module explores the book as a cultural form under changing conditions
of technical reproducibility. The materialities of the book have come under
increasing scrutiny in the wake of electronic media and the new archival storage
possibilities heralded by digital culture. Against millenarian talk about the ‘end of
the book’ as a support for the act of reading, this module discusses practices that
resisted and reinvented the book’s physical properties at earlier moments of
technological change, from Romantic cultures of the book marked by the 1774
copyright act to their recreations in twentieth-century artists’ books. Efforts to
resist the book as a commercial object published in identical multiples for an
anonymous reading public often took the form of handcrafted interventions, which
highlight the bibliographical codes that define the operations of the book as a
support for reading. The architectures and archeologies of the page indicate its
functioning as a site of sociability, collaborative authorship, and composite art from the expanded extra-illustrated page to the crowded walls of words of William
Blake’s plates and the overwrought margins of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press
compared to the fin-de-siècle aspiration for a ‘book all margin; full of beautiful
unwritten thoughts’. Bound and unbound formats speak out the horizon of the
book in changing cultures of reading and viewing. The boundaries and partitions
of books become dynamic, books nest inside other books, plates disbound or
published in series trace unpredictable lines of flight and crystallize in hybrid
configurations that subvert stable notions of the book as a condition of possibility
for the production and circulation of knowledge. Such hybrid forms assemble
objects from different periods challenging distinctions between scribal and print
cultures, mechanical and autographic forms. They register the changing visual
cultures of the book supplemented by watercolours, prints, and later photographs,
and situate it in relation to the archive, the collection, and the gallery. Rooting
reading in concrete historical forms, this module opens up new ways of thinking
about the composite arts of the book, its multisensorial aesthetics, and intermedial
recreations.
Each session concentrates on a book practice that subverts, dismantles, or
recreates the codex as an alternative to the commercial book, concentrating on
39
Romantic books and their artistic recreations, including works by Walpole, Gray,
Sterne, Blake, Dickens, Morris, Stevenson, as well as artist book interventions by
Tom Phillips and John Baldessari.
Assessment
Assignment
Description
Weighting
Catalogue Entry
1,500-2,000 words 10%
Assessed Essay
4,500 Words
90%
Preliminary Readings
Blanchot, Maurice, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University
Press 2003), pp. 224-243
McDonald, Peter, ‘Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?’,
PMLA
(January
2006),
214-28
Price, Leah, ‘Reading: The State of the Discipline’, Book History, 7 (2004),
303-320
Price, Leah, ‘From The History of a Book to a “History of the Book”,
Representations, 108:1 (Fall 2009), 120-138
Stewart, Garrett, ‘Bookwork as Demediation’, Critical Inquiry, 36:3 (2010), 410-457
The Book History Reader, ed. by D. Finkelstein and A. McCleery, 2nd revised
edition (London: Routledge, 2006)
Renée Riese Hubert and Judd David Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’
Books (New York: Granary Books, 2001)
1. Unpacking the Library, Rethinking the Archive
This introductory session rethinks the book in relation to the library as a scene of
reading and a cultural laboratory.
William Hazlitt, ‘On Reading Old Books’, London Magazine (Feb. 1821), rpt in
Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P.P.Howe (London: Dent, 1930-33),
XII, 220-29; available on moodle
Charles Lamb, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, London Magazine
(July 1822), on moodle
Leigh Hunt, ‘My Books’, Literary Examiner (July 1823), 1-6 (full view on Google)
Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Collecting’, in Selected
Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith
(Harvard University Press, 1999, 2005), II:ii: 1931-34, 486-93; also rpt in
Candlin
Michel Foucault, ‘The Fantasia of the Library’, in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, ed. and trans. by Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977)
2. On the Margins of the Book, Inside-Out (In Theory)
This class explores the materiality of the book as a cultural form. Drawing on textual
bibliography to envision the partitions and spacings of the book, the paratext,
frontispiece, titlepage, margins, colophon open up as sites for appropriation,
inscription, transgression: What is inside and outside the book? What happens in
the book’s expanded margins?
40
William Blake marginalia to 1798 edition of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds
(Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, through Senate House Library
Databases)
Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), esp. p. 158.
Derrida, J., ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. S. Weber and J. Mehlman, Glyph, 1
(1977); rpt in Limited Inc, ed. by Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,
1988)
Genette, G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin (CUP 1997).
Jackson, H.J., Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (Yale UP 2005)
3. Between the Sheets: The Extra-Illustrated Book
This session explores extra-illustration, a practice that questions the book as a
stable support for reading by altering its form, interleaving it with additional pages,
prints, watercolours, and other extraneous materials. As a result, the book ceases
to be an identical copy within a homogeneous print run and becomes a unique
object that documents an idiosyncratic practice of reading, viewing, and collecting.
Our key example in this class, Horace Walpole’s extra-illustrations of Strawberry
Hill, exemplifies the metaphorical interchangeability between the book, the house,
and the collection as a scene of composition.
Horace Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill as extra-illustrated by himself and
others:
Lewis
Walpole
Digital
Collection
http://lwlimages.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/ (shelfmark: 33 30).
[Horace Walpole], The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshall,
Gent. From the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto (1764)
Further Readings
Klancher, J., “Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall of Book History in the Nineteenth
Century,” in Bookish Histories: Literature, Books, and Commercial Modernity
1700-1900, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (New York: Palgrave, 2009)
Peltz, L., ‘Facing the Text: the amateur and commercial histories of extraillustration, c. 1770-1840’, in R. Myers et al., eds., Owners, Annotators, and the
Signs of Reading (London: The British Library, 2005), pp. 91-135.
Peltz, L., ‘A Friendly Gathering. The Social Politics of Presentation Books and their
Extra-Illustration in Horace Walpole’s Circle’, Journal of the History of
Collections, (2006), 1-17
4. The Illuminated Book and the Book of Designs: William Blake’s poetic
portable galleries
Poised between the illuminated manuscript and the portable picture gallery, Blake’s
Illuminated books destabilize the idea of the book as a homogeneous commodity,
by disrupting the expectation of stability that made it a condition of possibility for the
41
dissemination of knowledge in the Gutenberg era. Is the book ‘an organizing
fiction,... a useful mode to try and contain what turn out to be uncontainable
images’? (Makdisi). In this class we will consider Blake’s The First Book of Urizen,
and the separate life that some of its plates acquire in the Small and Large Books of
Designs, which he produced for miniature artist Ozias Humphry.
Blake, William, The Book of Urizen (www.blakearchive.com);
Blake, William, The Small and Large Books of Designs (British Museum; Tate
Britain; www.blakearchive.org)
Further Reading
Butlin, Martin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols (New
Haven:Yale University Press, 1981)
Goode, M., ‘What do Blake’s Images Want?’, Representations, 119:1 (Summer
2012), 1-36
Hagstrum, Jean, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964)
Hagstrum, Jean, ‘Blake and the Sister-Arts Tradition’, in Blake’s Visionary Forms
Dramatic, ed. by D.V.Erdman and J. E. Grant (Princeton, 1970), pp. 82-91
Mann, P., ‘The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book’, in Unnam’d Forms:
Blake and Textuality, ed. by N. Hilton and T.Vogler (Berkeley: California UP,
1986), pp. 49-68
Mann, P., ‘Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce’, ELH,
(1985)
Mitchell, W.J.T., Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton University Press, 1978)
5. Blake’s Recycled Book: extra-illustration, remediation, inscription
This class explores the life of a book within another book through three experiments
with which William Blake altered Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: first, he drew on
first and second editions of Young’s nine nights (1742-5), which were disbound and
inlaid on larger sheets, and extra-illustrated the mounted pages with 537
watercolour designs in the mid 1790s; secondly, he engraved a selection of 43
designs for an edition of the first four nights (1797); finally, he used the proofs of the
surround engravings with a rectangle left blank in the middle for the letterpress as a
writing surface on which to inscribe the manuscript Vala or the Four Zoas: ‘in
experimenting with these designs as places where his Four Zoas text could
materialize, Blake was creating a scenario of possible reading, where page layout
becomes instruction rather than representation’ (Ault)
Blake’s Night Thoughts extra-illustrations are in the British Museum Department of
Prints and Drawings. Its digital reproductions can be perused online through the
British Museum Collection Database, online at
The 1797 engravings can be perused online through the Blake Archive
(www.blakearchive.org).
William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A Complete Edition, 2
vols, ed. by D. V.Erdman, J. E.Grant, E. J.Rose, M. J.Tolley (Oxford, 1980)
The Four Zoas by William Blake: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript with
Commentary on the Illuminations, ed. by C.Tramontano Magno and D.Erdman
(Lewisburg, 1987), selections available through moodle
42
Further Reading
Ault, Donald, ‘Postscript on the Four Zoas as Visual Text’, Narrative Unbound
(Station
Hill
Press,
1987),
469-72,
online
at:
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00076002/00001/1j
rpt in ‘William Blake and Visual Culture’, ed. by Roger Whitson and Donald
Ault, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies, 3:2 (2006). online at:
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_2/ault/index.shtml
Grant, John, ‘Visions in Vala: A Consideration of Some Pictures in the Manuscript’,
in Blake’s Sublime Allegory, ed. by S. Curran and J. A. Wittreich (Madison,
1973) pp. 141-202
Heppner, Christopher, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995)
Lincoln, Andrew, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala, or The Four
Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
6. READING WEEK
7. The Album and the Photobook in the 1840s (with Patrizia di Bello)
This session looks at two of the earliest experiments at using photographs to make
illustrated books: William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (London, 184446) and AA’s (Anna Atkins) Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
(Halstead, Seveoaks, 1843-53), discounted by some as not a ‘proper’ book but
more of an album. We are going to discuss them, the difference between making an
album and making (or publishing) a book, and how they negotiate the photograph,
the blank page, and the physical relationship between image and text. Please have
a look on-line before the seminar, as well as tackling the key readings.
The Pencil of Nature can be accessed at:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-pdf.pdf
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is in the British Library
catalogue of Photographically Illustrated Books:
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/photographyinbooks/record.asp?RecordID=3048
Key readings
Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir, ‘Introduction’, The Photobook from Talbot to
Rusha and Beyond, ed. by Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon
Zamir (London: IB Tauris, 2012), 1-16. Also, a useful ‘Select Bibliography’
229-232
Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 18431875 (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT, 1998), especially chapter 2 ‘A
Scene in a Library: The First Photographically Illustrated Book’, 107-110
8. Dickens In Parts
Serial publication shows the more fluid boundaries of the book unbound, testing
ideas about what is inside and outside the text, the relationship between
composition and advertising; the book, the work, and the oeuvre. This class
43
explores the serial and unbound publication of Dickens in parts, paying attention to
the relationship between official plates and sets of extra-illustrations published to
complement the print run of each work. Through the serialization of Dickens’s work
we will compare the periodical publication in parts and bound in volume and think
about the different temporalities of reading embedded in each.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, serialized in Master Humphrey’s Clock
(1840-1), read in the Penguin edition
Sets of prints produced to extra-illustrate these works will be discussed in class
9. The Ideal Book and the Fantasia of the Library: William Morris’s Kelmscott
Press
William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891 to reinvent the book as a work
of art ‘whose only ornament is the necessary and essential beauty which arises out
of the fitness of a piece of craftsmanship for the use which it is made’. His organic
and architectural notion of book making goes against the division of labour and the
distinction between letterpress and illustration in an attempt to recuperate the visual
aesthetic of the medieval arts and crafts, ‘the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, & of
the earlier printing which took its place’. This class explores the material principles
forms of Morris’s press, the corpus and the ‘fantasia of the library’ that can be
detected from his list, as a startingpoint for the analysis of one of the books he
printed.
Walker, Emery, 'Letterpress Printing and Illustration', delivered on 15 November
1888 to the Arts and Crafts Society, reviewed as ‘Printing and Printers’ by
Oscar Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette, 16 Nov 1888, in The Ideal Book,
Appendix B, 324-333
Morris, William, ‘The Ideal Book’, delivered on 19 June 1893 at the Bibliographical
Society in London and published in Transactions of the Bibliographical Society
(1893), rpt in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book,
ed. by William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1893/ideal.htm
Morris, William, A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott
Press. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1898
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kelmscott-press/note-by-william-morris/
Analysis of one volume published by the Kelmscott Press (eg. Coleridge, Keats,
Morris’s Earthly Love...)
Kelmscott Press Facsimiles: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kelmscott-press/
Further Reading
Ruskin, John, Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with
Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1872
(London: George Allen, 1890)
Arscott, Caroline, ‘William Morris: Decoration and Materialism’, in Andrew
Hemingway, ed., Marxism and the History of Art: from William Morris to the
New Left (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 9-27
Dreyfus, John, ‘Emery Walker’s 1888 Lecture on ‘Letterpress Printing’: A
Reconstruction and a Reconsideration’, Craft History, 1 (1988), 118-30
Maxwell, Richard, ed., The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville: University
44
Press of Virginia, 2002)
10. A Treated Victorian Novel: Tom Phillips’s Humument (1970-)
Tom Phillips’s The Humument has been altering W.H.Mallock’s Human Document
(1892) since 1966, when the ‘objet trouvé’ became a changing palimpsest for a
‘Gesamtkunstwerk in small format’. A first volume published as a box of ten silk
screened prints by Tetrad Press in 1970, followed by ten more ‘volumes’ printed as
a limited edition of one hundred copies, the first private press instantiation of the
work was completed and shown at the ICA in 1973, and subsequently published as
a commercial book in five editions (1980, 1987, 1997, 2005, 2012), now also
available as an Ipad and Iphone app. Applying William Burrough’s ‘cut up’
technique, Phillips’s ‘Scribe art of the hand’ (1997, p. 7) turns each page into an
artwork, which obliterates most of the letterpress apart from selected islands and
rivers of words. The text thus obtained becomes a script for changing performances
of concrete poetry, variations in the manner of ‘exercises in style’ (Raymond
Queneau), a ‘Journal of Secret Scribing and Hiding’ (1997, p. 6). Fragments have
migrated to other works from the libretto for the opera Irma to Dante’s Inferno, and
his illustrations of Cicero for the Folio Society.
Phillips, Tom, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (London, 1980, 1987, 1997,
2005, 2012)
http://humument.com/
Further Reading
Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester,
NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985)
Caws, M.A., ‘Tom Phillips: Treating and Translating’, Mosaic 34:3 (September
2001), 19-33
Greenberg, Clement, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960; Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. by John O’Brien (1993), IV, on moodle
Hubert, R. R. and J. D., The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books (New York:
Granary Books, 2001)
King, Andrew David, ‘ “Were there but world enough and time”: Tom Phillips on A
Humument’,
Kenyon
Review
(September
2012),
http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/09/tom-phillips-interview/
Knickerbocker, C., ‘William Burroughs: An Interview’, The Paris Review, 35 (1965),
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-williams-burroughs
Phillips, T., Tom Phillips: Works and Texts, intr. by Huston Paschal (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1992)
11. Artists’ Books
The Artist Book is a form that questions the book as a commodity, by intervening
on its material form thus calling the reader’s attention to the materiality of form.
Inaugurated by the ‘Livre d’artiste’, or ‘Artist’s Book’ as a deluxe edition, the
artist’s book took a new shape with Ed Ruscha’s photobook Twenty-six Gasoline
Stations (1962), distributed through commercial book circuits. This class
concentrates on the work of late 20C and early 21C book artists using an
45
eighteenth and a nineteenth-century book as a starting point for an artist’s book.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, with
39 photo-collage illustrations by John Baldessari (San Francisco: Arion
Press,
1988)
National Art Gallery, Special Collections, shelfmark: X900175 380 419 900
30066
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), an
artist book by Linda Toigo, http://www.lindatoigo.com/lindatoigo.com/jh.html
Further Reading
Melvyn New, 'William Hogarth and John Baldessari: ornamenting Sterne's 'Tristram
Shandy', Word & Image, 11:2 (1995)
Drucker, Johanna, A Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995),
pp. 1-19
Renée Riese Hubert and Judd David Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’
Books (New York: Granary Books, 2001)
46
Death in Victorian Culture
Spring Term: Monday, 7.30-9.00pm
Module Convenor: Dr David McAllister
This module offers you the chance to explore the extraordinary and distinctive culture
that grew up around the subject of death in the Victorian period. In a series of seminars
and student-led presentations we will cover a huge range of topics, from the vast,
landscaped garden cemeteries which opened up on the fringes of cities, replacing the
often obscenely overcrowded parish churchyards which had been the focal point of grief
and community for centuries, to the opening of Julia’s Bureau, the West End office in
which W.T. Stead sought to ‘bridge the abyss between the Two Worlds’ of the living and
the dead. We will examine the rich material culture which developed around death in
the period, studying the significance of the death masks, mourning jewellery and other
memento mori they fashioned, and the businesses that developed to serve the lucrative
market for ostentatious displays of commemoration and mourning. You will be
encouraged to explore the intersections between this material archive and the
representation of death, grief and loss in the literature that was shaped by, and in turn
helped to shape, this culture. There will also be an optional field trip to one of London’s
Victorian cemeteries.
Week 1: Introduction.
Primary Reading: tbc
Week 2: Burying the dead
This session will look at the scandals surrounding Victorian burial grounds, the rise and
fall of the landscaped Garden Cemtery, and the sanitary reform movement that
Primary Reading: G.A. Walker, Burial-Ground Incendiarism: the Last Fire at the BoneHouse in the Spa-Fields Golgotha (1846); John Claudius Loudon, On the Laying Out,
Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843); John Strang, Necropolis Glasguensis
(1831); Edwin Chadwick Supplementary Report… (1843); various images of garden
cemeteries.
Week 3: Public deaths
This seminar will focus on two mid-century funerals: the famous state funeral of the
Duke of Wellington in 1852, which is often identified as the culminating point of the
elaborate Victorian funeral and, perhaps less familiarly, the burial of bare-knuckle prize
fighter Tom Sayers, whose riotous interment at Highgate drew a crowd of 100,000
mostly working-class mourners onto the streets of North London in 1865.
Primary Reading: various textual and visual accounts of the funerals from
contemporary sources.
Week 4: Private grief
This session will focus on Coventry Patmore’s The Unknown Eros, a collection of
elegies written for his wife (who had earlier been the subject of his notorious The Angel
in the House). We will discuss the purpose of consolatory verse, using Freud’s
Mourning and Melancholia.
Primary Reading: Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia; Coventry Patmore, The
Unknown Eros; extract from The English Elegy by Peter Sacks.
Week 5: Mourning and the marketplace:
47
Students will be asked to find and discuss examples of the commodification of Victorian
death culture. These might be advertisements for the huge mourning warehouses that
met demand for bombazeen and crepe, prospectuses for investors in the joint-stock
companies which ran cemeteries at a profit, or accounts of acquisitive and crooked
undertakers, who were routinely believed to prey on the vulnerable in order to turn a
profit from death.
Week 7: Talking to the dead
This session will examine the birth of Victorian spiritualism. We will consider the gender
and class implications of a movement which typically placed working-class female
mediums in close physical proximity to middle- and upper-class men, and explore the
links between the paranormal and the birth of new technologies such as the radio, the
telephone and the telegraph.
Week 8: Picturing the dead
In this session we will continue our exploration of the connections between new
technologies and Victorian death culture by looking at the practices of post-mortem and
spirit photography. We will look at how these connect to wider Victorian discourses of
sentimentalism, and will discuss how the representational strategies of the postmortem photographers can be read in the context of the evolving relationship between
living and dead, past and present, absent and present.
Primary Reading: various visual material; John Troyer, ‘Embalmed Vision’, Mortality,
12.1 (2007), 22-47.
Week 9: Death and Display: The Paris Morgue in the Victorian Imagination
The Paris morgue, which stood on the banks of the Seine, displayed bodies which had
been found in the city’s streets ,or hauled from the river itself, in a highly public and
compellingly theatrical style in the hope that the dead would be recognised and claimed
by someone among the crowds who flocked to see the latest exhibits. The morgue was
a regular haunt of British travellers, and this
session will focus on visual
representations of the morgue and Dickens’s various accounts of his compulsive desire
to visit whenever he was in Paris.
Primary Reading: Charles Dickens, ‘Railway Dreaming’, ‘Some Recollections of
Mortality’; various visual material.
Week 10. Psychical Research
This session will focus on the Psychical Research movement, which sought to establish
a scientific basis for a belief in the existence of life after death. We will consider the
various phenomena that the psychical researchers investigated, from automatic writing
to telepathy, and will look in detail at W.T. Stead’s formation of ‘Julia’s Bureau’, a WestEnd office that was designed to ‘bridge the abyss’ between the living and the dead, and
in which the dead took on a managerial role in the running of the office.
Primary Reading: tbc
Week 11: The crowd of the dead
We will read conclude by reading Margaret Oliphant’s short novel A Beleaguered City
and considering the effects of the growth in the number of the dead as an inverted form
of nineteenth-century fears over population. We will consider how urbanisation and
population growth contributed to each of the aspects of the Victorian culture of death
considered thus far on the module.
Primary Reading: Margaret Oliphant, A Beleagured City; extract from Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities; extract from Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power.
Secondary bibliography
48
This bibliography is general and indicative, and offers some useful introductory reading.
It will be supplemented by more specific bibliographies for each individual seminar on
the module.
Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
–––. The Hour of Our Death. London: Allen Lane, 1981.
Brooks, Chris. Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian and
Edwardian Cemetery. Exeter: Wheaton, 1989.
Cecil, Robert. The Masks of Death: Changing Attitudes in the Nineteenth Century.
Lewes: The Book Guild, 1991.
Curl, James Stevens. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Stroud: Sutton Publishing,
2000.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political
Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Goodwin, Sarah Webster and Elizabeth Bronsfen eds. Death and Representation.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in
Victorian England. Albany, NY.: SUNY Press, 2009.
Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press,
2000.
Matthews, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poets' Graves, Bodies, and Books in the
Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2003.
McManners, John. Death and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981. (Looks at an earlier period but has an excellent introduction, and is well worth
reading).
Prioreschi, Plinio. A History of Human Responses to Death: Mythologies, Rituals, and
Ethics. Lewiston, NY.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
Richardson, Ruth. "Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain?" In Death, Ritual, and
Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke, 105-17. London: Routledge, 1989.
–––. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
Rosenberg, John D. Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature.
London: Anthem Press, 2005.
Schor, Esther. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning From the
Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Strange, Julie-Marie, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Wolffe, John. Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and
Edwardian Britain. Oxford: The British Academy, 2000.
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
49
Victorian Emotions
Spring Term: Tuesday 6.00-7.20pm
Module Convenor: Dr Carolyn Burdett
EMOTION (OED)
1. A moving out, migration, transference from one place
to another. Obs.
2. A moving, stirring, agitation, perturbation (in physical
sense). Obs.
3. A political or social agitation; a tumult, popular
disturbance. Obs.
4. a. fig. Any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling,
passion; any vehement or excited mental state.
b. Psychology. A mental ‘feeling’ or ‘affection’ (e.g. of
pleasure or pain, desire or aversion, surprise, hope or
fear, etc.), as distinguished from cognitive or volitional
states of consciousness. Also abstr. ‘feeling’ as
distinguished from the other classes of mental
phenomena.
5.
attrib. and Comb. a. attrib., as emotion-marker, reaction. b. objective and obj. gen., as emotionarousing, -provoking adjs. c. instrumental, as
emotion-charged, -shaken adjs.
This course will
explore a range of
ways in which
emotions are important in studying the Victorian period. It will consider the extent to
which emotions are historical: what evidence is there that emotions are experienced,
discussed, or represented in historically specific ways? What are the languages of
feeling which the Victorians inherit, and how are these languages transformed? How
are key terms like sentiment and sympathy deployed and discussed? How do the
processes of secularization taking place during the nineteenth century shape ideas
about and experiences of feeling? How do Darwinian and other forms of scientific
thought affect the ways in which emotions are understood?
For the Victorians, as for us, cultural forms are often the means through which
emotions are given shape and made communicable. The course also investigates the
diverse ways in which the Victorians articulated and shared emotional experience, as
both producers and consumers of culture. In examining the Victorians’ emotional
responses we will also need to consider what methodologies of reading or viewing are
at work when studying emotions, including the effects of our own emotional responses.
Extracts from non-fictional materials will either be downloadable, or made available as
photocopies)
50
Week 1 Introducing emotion
Thomas Dixon, ‘”Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review, 4, 4
(2012), 1-7.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical
Review, 107, 3 (2002), 821-45.
Week 2 Dickensian sentimentality and social reform
Dickens is a key figure for thinking about Victorian sentiment and sentimentality. In
order that we can discuss a range of key scenes, we will look at some famous
‘sentimental’ scenes (as extracts). We’ll also look at examples of contemporary
response to Dickens’s sentimentalism as well as a longer, more considered estimate of
Dickens’s writing , with interesting things to say about emotion and art.
Charles Dickens, Chp 71, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1); A Christmas Carol (1843)
[try to read the whole story, especially if you don’t know it – but, at the least, Stave 4];
Chp 47 ‘Jo’s Will’, Bleak House (1852-3).
[Stephen] Unsigned review of the Library Edition of Dickens's Works, Saturday Review,
8 May 1858 [access via ‘British Periodicals’, BBK elibrary].
George Henry Lewes, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, Fortnightly Review 11, 62 (Feb
1872), 141-54 [access via ‘British Periodicals’, BBK elibrary].
Secondary reading
To help begin thinking about the issues raised by Victorian sentimentality, see the
following:
Philip Davis, ‘Victorian Realist Prose and Sentimentality’, in Alice Jenkins and Juliet
John (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 13-28.
Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton
Introduction and any/all of the essays included in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the
Long Nineteenth Century, Issue 4, Rethinking Victorian Sentimentality, ed. by Nicola
Bown (April 2007).
See also the additional secondary reading below.
Week 3 Viewing sentiment
This week we’ll consider two further instances of sentiment and sentimentalism.
1. First, we’ll take a look one of the most cited critical attacks on sentimentalism :
James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Sentimentalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 10 (July 1864),
65-75 [access via ‘British Periodicals’, BBK elibrary].
2. We’ll then move on to look at some sentimental pictures from the period, in order
to think about how ‘emotion’ is visually suggested or manifested, and where
emotion resides (is it in the viewer, or in the picture, or in both?)
You can prepare by looking at a web survey of the V&A’s ‘A Show of Emotion’
exhibition
(which
you
can
find
here:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/prints_books/past_displays/victorian_sentiment/index.
html)
Secondary reading
Nicola Bown, ‘Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of Sentimentality’,
Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, 2 (2011), 214-225.
Sonia Solicari, 'Selling Sentiment: the Commodification of Emotion in Victorian Visual
Culture', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Issue 4,
Rethinking Victorian Sentimentality, ed by Nicola Bown (April 2007).
51
Week 4 Evolving emotion
As Victorian science sought to understand mind in terms of the material and naturalistic
categories, emotions were re-theorised and increasingly seen in terms of evolutionary
developments. We read extracts from Darwin’s work on this topic.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) [extracts].
Week 5 What is an emotion? science, psychology, feeling
As psychology developed as a distinct discipline, separate from theology, philosophy,
medicine and literature, physiological perspective dominated. Many writers,
nevertheless, worked hard to retain categories such as the will or aesthetic responses –
often as exemplary of evolved and ‘civilized’ subjectivity.
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Unconscious Cerebration’, from Darwinism in Morals and Other
Essays (1872) and William Benjamin Carpenter, ‘The Power of the Will over Mental
Action’, extract from Principles of Mental Physiology (2nd edn; 1874), both in Embodied
Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp.
93-5; 95-101. [All of the excerpts in the section ‘Associationism and Physiological
Psychology’ from this Reader are useful].
William James, ‘What Is an Emotion?’, Mind, Vol. 9, No. 34. (April 1884), pp. 188-205
[you
can
access
Mind
via
JStor
or
direct
from
this
url:
http://web.mac.com/cludwig/Site/Philosophie_de_lesprit_files/james.pdf]
Week 6 READING WEEK
Week 7 Feeling and ethics: the case of sympathy
For the next two weeks, we will use George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, as a
focus for exploring a range of issues which emerged in the 1870s and 80s, about the
nature of mind and morality, emotions, will and physiology. We will consider Eliot’s
earlier configurations of sympathy and see how this, her final novel, problematizes
them. To begin, we also read one of the classic eighteenth-century texts on sympathy,
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) [any good edition]
Adam Smith, Part 1, Section 1, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Week 8
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Plus extracts from Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871); Leslie Stephen, The
Science of Ethics (1882) plus others.
Week 9 Non-human animals: vivisection and the communality of suffering
Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science (1883)
[The Broadview Press edn (ed Steve Farmer, 1996) includes much of the additional
reading from the vivisection debates. Try to get hold of the novel in this edition.]
In addition to Collins’s novel we will read a selection of extracts from the vivisection
debates of the 1870s and 80s. We will consider both the extent to which earlier
sentimental tropes and images are still powerful, and the ways in which ‘emotion’ and
scientific ‘objectivity’ were constructed as hostile antagonists. The gendered qualities of
the debate will also be our focus.
52
Frances Power Cobbe, 'Vivisection and Its Two-Faced Advocates', Contemporary
Review 41 (April 1882), 610-26 [this is available to download via the 'British journals'
link on the Birkbeck library page, and also in Heart and Science above].
Gerald F.Yeo, letter to the editor, responding to Cobbe's 'Vivisection and Its Two-Faced
Advocates', Contemporary Review, 41, (May 1882), 897-98.
George Hoggan, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post, rpt Spectator, Feb 6 1875.
‘Our Object’, Animal World 1 (1869), 8.
Punch pieces (various: provided as photocopy).
Week 10 Educating emotions
This week we read Cobbe again – this time in relation to ideas of emotional education.
Although much attention was focused on understanding the origin and function of
emotion, Cobbe picks up on another tradition that views emotions as impersonal and
contagious. We’ll also look at some extracts about crowd psychology and, time
permitting, some of the ideas about altruism that Cobbe criticises.
Frances Power Cobbe, 'The Education of the Emotions', Fortnightly Review, 43
(February 1888), 223-236.
Week 11 Late-Victorian fear and horror
There is an extensive secondary literature on Victorian fear and terror, although it rarely
approaches the issue from the perspective of thinking about emotions and their
historical form. We’ll consider how these texts explore taboo feelings, and assess what
has changed in relation to earlier Victorian treatment of sentiment and sympathy.
Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
Secondary bibliography
This bibliography is intended to indicate areas of further reading, some very closely
connected to the work of the seminars, and some suggesting how you might develop
your own interests. I have occasionally included works on specific areas but, more
often, I have tried to indicate one or two key texts which contain excellent bibliographic
suggestions for you to pursue. You will, of course, also need to make your own
literature searches, using electronic and other data-bases.
Important secondary texts which introduce the field
Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C Solomon (eds) What Is An Emotion?: Classical
Readings in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The Eighteenth Century
The literature on eighteenth-century sentiment is vast: you may find it helpful to consult
one or two of the following when thinking about the continuities and differences for the
Victorians.
Ildiko Csengei, ‘”I Will Not Weep”: Reading Through the Tears of Henry Mackenzie’s
Man of Feeling’, Modern Languages Review, 103 (2008), 952-69.
53
Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2009)
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990)
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion: Hume to Austen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Sentimentality
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Issue 4, Rethinking
Victorian Sentimentality, ed by Nicola Bown (April 2007) [Contains an excellent
introduction by Bown, as well as articles on Dickens by Ledger, Mason and Tilley].
Miriam Bailin, ‘”Dismal Pleasure”: Victorian sentimentality and the Pathos of the
Parvenu’, ELH, 66, 4 (Winter 1999), 1015-32.
--‘Seeing is Believing in Enoch Arden’, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian
Visual Imagination, eds. Carol Christ and John Jordan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2000)
Carolyn Burdett (ed), ‘Sentimentalities’, New Agenda Journal of Victorian Culture, 16, 2
(2011).
‘Dickens and Feeling’, ed Bethan Carney and Catherine Waters, 19: Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 14 (2012).
Philip Collins, From Manly Tear to Stiff Upper Lip: The Victorians and Pathos
(Wellington, NZ: Victorian University Press, 1974)
Philip Davis, ‘Victorian Realist Prose and Sentimentality’, in Alice Jenkins and Juliet
John (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 13-28.
Howard W. Fulweiler, “Here a Captive Heart Busted”: Studies in the Sentimental
Journey of Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993) [contains
chapters on Tennyson and Hopkins, Bleak House and Jude]
Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987)
John Irving, ‘In Defence of Sentimentality’, The New York Times Book Review (25
December
1979)
–
accessed
here:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/irving-sentimentality.html
Mary Lenard, ‘”Mr Popular Sentiment”: Dickens and the Gender Politics Of
Sentimentalism and Social Reform Literature’, Dickens Studies Annual, 27 (1998), 4568.
Shirley Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in
Nineteenth-Century America, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Paul Schlicke, ‘Sentiment’, in Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1999), 511-513.
Robert Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Nancy Yousef, ‘The Poverty of Charity: Dickensian Sympathy’, in Contemporary
Dickens ed Elaine Gillooly and Deidre David (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2009), 53-74 [excellent on C18 antecedents; detailed reading of Bleak House].
You can pursue some of the issues raised in studying Dickens and sentimentality by
looking more closely at melodrama. An excellent starting point, which provides a full
bibliography and account of Victorian melodrama, is Juliet John, ‘Melodrama and its
Criticism: An Essay in Memory of Sally Ledger’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, Issue 8, Victorian Theatricalities (April 2009)
54
Sympathy
Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). [Chps on David Copperfield, Wuthering
Heights, Mill on the Floss, The Woman in White and He Knew He Was Right.]
Rae D. Greiner, ‘Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy versus Empathy in the
Realist Novel’, Victorian Studies, 53, 3 (Spring 2011), 417-426.
Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins
Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000) [Discusses Dickens’ A Christmas
Carol, Conan Doyle, Mayhew, Gaskell’s Ruth, East Lynne, Daniel Deronda and Dorian
Gray. The general thesis indicts the novel, and sympathy, as consolidating relations of
power].
Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the
Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Anthem, 2007) [looks at novels by Dickens,
Gaskell, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik, arguing against
literary critical orthodoxies that sympathy should be a guiding principle for literary
criticism]
Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [Complex and
dense but an interesting discussion of sympathy and literary allusion. There’s also
extended discussion of Browning and the dramatic monologue].
Daniel Deronda
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, ‘George Eliot's Conception of Sympathy’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 40, 1 (1985), 23-42.
Carole Jones, 'Introduction', George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Wordsworth, 2003)
[this discussion includes ideas of sympathy and empathy in the novel; it's also got a
useful bibliography]
Jill L. Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) [chp on Daniel Deronda plus v interesting material
on feeling and shock in C19 novels]
Adela Pinch, Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [contains a chp on Daniel Deronda as
well as other topics of interest).
Vanessa L Ryan, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (Johns Hopkins
Pamela Thurschwell, 'George Eliot's Prophecies: Coercive Second Sight and Everyday
Thought Reading', in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The
Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2004), 87-108.
Other Victorian studies on emotions (incl poetry)
Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
[Ildiko Csengei has a forthcoming study on the heart: not exclusively Victorian – keep
an eye out for it.]
Elizabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the 19th Century
Novel (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1979)
Emma Mason, Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Horndon: Northcote House,
2006)
55
Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian
Discourses on Emotions, 1830-1872 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002)
There are ‘special issues’ on emotions: Victorian Studies, 50, 3 (2008); Isis, 100, 4
(December 2009) [science]; Textual Practice, 22, 1 (2008).
Historical and scientific contexts (including medical and psychological)
Isis, 100, 4 (December 2009) [a special issue on emotions and science; see especially
the pieces by Paul White]
Fay Bound Alberti (ed), Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts 1830-19-1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
Janet Browne, ‘Darwin and the Expression of the Emotions’, in The Darwinian Heritage,
ed David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 307-26.
William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993
Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (London: Sage,
1997)
Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [More directly about moral debate, but with
great relevance to thinking about emotions, this traces the influence of Comtean
positivism and the ways in which Comte’s term ‘altruism’ was contested and
assimilated].
Jim Endersby, ‘Sympathetic Science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, and the
Passions of Victorian Naturalists’, Victorian Studies Volume 51, Number 2, (Winter
2009), 299-320
Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978)
Robert G. Frank, Jr., 'The Telltale Heart: Physiological Instruments, Graphic Methods,
and Clinical Hopes 1854-1914', in William Coleman and Frederick L.Holmes (eds), The
Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in 19th-Century Medicine (Berkely:
University of California press, 1988), 211-290.
Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge
University press, 2001)
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford
Paul White, 'The Face of Physiology', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, 7 (2008)
Vivisection
Richard French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975)
Susan Hamilton (ed), Animal Welfare and Anti-Vivisection 1870-1910: 19th-Century
Woman's Mission, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) [an extensive
collection of primary resources, focused on the work of Frances Power Cobbe. It's
available at the British Library]
56
Jed Mayer, ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Laboratory Animals’, Victorian
Studies, 50, 3 (2008), 399-417.
Laura Otis, ‘Howled out of the Country: Wilkie Collins and H. G. Wells Retry David
Farrier’, in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, edited by Anne Stiles (Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.
Rob Preece, Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 64, 3 (2003), 399-419.
Paul White, 'Sympathy under the Knife: Experimentation and Emotion in Late Victorian
Medicine', in Fay Bound Alberti (ed), Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 100-124.
Stuart Richards, 'Drawing the Life-Blood of Physiology: Vivisection and the
Physiologists’ Dilemma, 1870-1900', Annals of Science, 43 (1986), 27-56.
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University press, 1987)
James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian
Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 1980)
Nicholaas A Rupke (Ed), Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Croom Helm,
1987)
Other (not necessarily Victorian) relevant works, including philosophical and historical
studies of the emotions
Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2004)
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error (1994, London: Vintage 2006)
Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2002) [a study of anger, fear, grief, shame...]
Daniel M Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern
Brain Science (Chicago: Chicago and London, 2006).
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) [an
investigation of the question of whether novel-reading cultivates empathy and, if so,
whether this leads to better human relationships and actions]
Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009)
[Short but useful historical section before a psychoanalytic interpretation of kindness:
quick to read and provocative]
Nancy Snow, ‘Compassion’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 28, 3 (1991), 195-205.
Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1976)
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian
Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
57
Romantic Studies Internship
Learning Aims and Outcomes
Research and contextualise a practical task or event in terms of current
academic debates and museum policy
Critically appraise the conjunction of museum theory and practice
Reflect upon the historical and contemporary display and representation of
Romantic Objects
Understand the constraints and opportunities involved in professional museum
work (e.g. economic, political, ideological)
To learn how to fuse original research with critical writing and contextual
information
Apply relevant theoretical models to a practical event or task
Analytically compare empirical with theoretical material
Evaluate research in relation to practice
Devise well informed solutions to practical problems
To continue to develop the ability to read critically and analyse primary and
secondary literature
To continue to develop the ability to construct and present their arguments orally,
in writing and electronically
Module Description
The internship is the intellectual and practical application of the MA’s focus on the
multisensorial and material aspects of culture at the centre of the Core Course
‘Romantic Objects’. The aim of the Romantic Studies Internship is to allow you to
develop an expertise in an institution that holds important Romantic period materials
and to develop a historical and interdisciplinary grasp of Romantic period culture,
collections, and collecting practices. Working within a museum, gallery, or archive offers
you empirical, practical, and experiential skill development. Working within a museum,
gallery, or archive will introduce you to a range of disciplinary practices and ways of
thinking, giving you a chance to apply historical and theoretical study to practical tasks,
and to test the limits of academic learning through practice. You will develop
information-gathering, bibliographic, archival and writing skills.
Assessment
Assignment
Description
Weighting
Portfolio
of Examples of work produced during the 10%
Practical Work
internship + 1000 word reflective log
Assessed Essay
5,000 Words
90%
NB: The Romantic Studies internship is subject to an application form and selection
process. Please contact the Programme Director for further details.
58
Directed Reading in Romantic Studies
This module allows you to work closely with a member of staff, using her advice to
guide an independent research and writing project. The aim is to cater to specialist
research needs in subject areas not catered to by the module offerings, allowing
students to delve into a well-defined research project involving specialist skills and
primary materials (e.g. manuscript materials, official documents, etc.).
Assessment
Assignment
Indicative
Bibliography
Assessed Essay
Description
Weighting
1,500-2,000 Words 10%
5,000 Words
90%
NB: this module is available in exceptional circumstances as deemed appropriate by
the Programme Director and MA team. Please contact the Programme Director if you
would like to discuss this option.
59
Summer Term Activities
The summer term is dedicated to personal research as well as reading around more
wide-ranging explorations in Romantic period topics. In addition to the training sessions
listed above, student led reading group sessions are booked before or after the training
sessions (see below). There will be a range of lectures and panels during Birkbeck Arts
Week (usually scheduled in week 5 of the Summer Term), and a Romantic studies
conference:
Week 1 Monday 28 April, 7.40-9.00 Student Led Romantic Reading Group
Week 2 Wednesday 7 May, 6.00-7.20 Student Led Romantic Reading Group
Week 3 Monday 12 May, 7.40-9.00 Student Led Romantic Reading Group
Week 3 Wednesday 14 May, 7.40-9.00 Student Led Romantic Reading Group
Week 5: Birkbeck Arts Week
18-19 July 2014: 2-day conference on Blake and the Flaxman Circle
Further events will be announced during the academic year.
60
Coursework Presentation and Plagiarism
Coursework Presentation
Research essays must conform to the MHRA Style Guide (London: Modern Humanities
Research Association, 2008), which should be consulted for further explanation.
Libraries hold copies of this style guide, and you can buy it in good bookshops
(including Waterstones, Gower Street). It can also be downloaded for personal use
from:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml
Notes on the Presentation of Essays and Dissertations
1. Essays and dissertations must be typed or word-processed rather than hand-written,
double spaced on one side of A4 paper, with suitable margins to enable markers to
comment on your work. Your work should be submitted electronically, via Turnitin and
a second copy retain for yourself (this ensures your work should be recoverable if an
essay happens to go astray).
2. It is difficult to be prescriptive about the style and scope of the essays and
dissertations. Individual topics will often broadly determine the approach you are
going to take, how much primary and how much secondary reading you need to
attempt and so forth. Certainly, if you fell at all uneasy about how to tackle a particular
topic, you should seek tutorial advice.
Some general observations, however, may be offered about the standard expected.
We are looking for a developed critical argument within your essays. This does not
mean that you have to be strikingly original (though that is always welcome) but it does
mean that the essay should show a thoughtful assimilation and assessment of the
material you are dealing with – whether of a Renaissance text or of secondary material.
Bland surveys of scholarship should be avoided. The view of one or two modern
writers should not be presented as though they possess infallible ‘textbook’ status. This
does not imply that you cannot accept the arguments of a writer you agree with, but you
need to show evidence of having come to that agreement after reading widely around
the topic.
You should keep in mind the following when preparing your essays and dissertation:
A. Depth and extent of reading. You should try to achieve a balance between these
two. Some people prefer to concentrate on close and precise reading of one or two
texts or to argue closely on a narrowly focused topic. There is nothing wrong with this,
provided you remember also that it is essential to establish a context for the argument.
Others like to build arguments based on a large number of wide-ranging texts or to
detail a great mass of critical contributions. Again, this is fine, provided that the material
presented is germane to the chosen focus of the essay. If you are going to concentrate
on a small number of texts – e.g. Petrarch’s Sonnets – you should try to give some
indication what position they occupy in the Petrarch canon or, if adopting a generic
approach, how Petrarch’s sonnets compare with others of his period or later. In
contrast, if you are discussing a very broad topic – e.g. humanistic education – discuss
at length some representative examples and avoid making the discussion so diffuse
that you cannot offer anything more than commonplaces.
61
B. Recent scholarship. You should give some indication that you are acquainted with
recent scholarship and critical arguments (i.e. that published within the last decade).
Clearly, you are not expected to read everything that may have been written on your
topic, nor should you necessarily agree with the dominant directions taken by recent
criticism, but you must reveal some knowledge of the most important directions. There
is little point for instance in only recording accounts of Venice written during the 1950s
and 1960s, and from these constructing an argument about the relationship between
aristocracy and confraternities when scholarship since 1975 has completely
reformulated the nature of that relation. Similarly, to try to argue a view of Shakespeare
based on Tillyard’s influential Elizabethan World Picture (1943) when most recent critics
disagree completely with the book is to invite disaster. Part of the task in preparing
your essays and especially the dissertation is discovering what has been written about
your topic. It is important that you learn how to use libraries to discover what has been
done and to learn how to sift large amounts of information to discover what is important
for your discussion. The study skills sessions will help you with advice on this.
C. Documentation. References within your essay and the bibliography should be full,
consistent and properly presented. You are expected to consult and follow the
MHRA Style Book where a much fuller discussion of presentation is to be found. It can
be downloaded from the School of English and Humanities website:
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml.
Essays for options run by departments other than English and Humanities should,
however, follow their documentation guidelines.
While minor lapses (e.g. commas out of place, forgetting to mention the translator of a
work in the bibliography) may be ignored if they are infrequent, you will be penalized for
sloppy and inaccurate documentation. While doing your preparatory reading, it is
important to take full and accurate references so as to avoid spending a great deal of
time hunting back through works to find page numbers etc.
Often MA students underestimate the time it takes to prepare a successful essay. This
is not only because of the extent of the reading required, but because constructing a
carefully-documented piece, and dealing with a larger body of primary and secondary
materials than you are likely to have experienced in writing undergraduate essays, is a
time-consuming process. No matter how long you spend on doing the preparatory
reading, leave yourself plenty of time to write your piece.
D. Presentation.
1. Editions
Wherever possible, standard editions should be used, especially for passages essential
to the argument of the essay. References to the same work should be to the same
edition, unless differences between editions are relevant to the argument of the essay.
2. Quotations
Quotations must be accurate and should be checked carefully before the essay is
submitted.
62
Prose quotations up to about three lines and verse quotations up to one full line should
be incorporated into the body of the text. Longer quotations should be inset, in which
case inverted commas are not needed.
Once the source of quotation has been clearly identified in a footnote, quotations from
the same text and edition can be identified by page number (or line number, or act,
scene and line number etc., as appropriate) in parentheses immediately after the
quotations, thus avoiding unnecessary footnotes.
3. Footnotes
Footnotes should be succinct; they should not become miniature essays. There are
good grounds for restricting footnotes to:
i) The identification of quotations and other essential documentation.
ii) Undeveloped references to other relevant material: ‘see also…’
Documenting footnotes should follow the sequences:
a) Printed books: author, title (underlined); editor’s name (if appropriate,
preceded by ‘ed.’); place and date of publication (in parentheses);
volume, and/or page number(s).
b) Periodical articles: author, title of article (within single inverted
commas); title of periodical (underlined); volume number; date of
publication (in parentheses); page number(s).
Sample footnotes:
(1) G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962), p.24
(2) Hibbard, pp. 25-6 [a following reference to the same book]
(3) John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, lines 25-6 (Poems, ed. J. Kinsley, Oxford: OUP,
1958), I, 53
(4) Lois Whitney, ‘English primitavistic theories of epic origins’, MP, 21 (1924), 337 or
MP, xxi (1924), 337
4. List of Sources
At the end of the essay should be listed all the works, including editions of the texts
discussed, that have been consulted in its preparation. The list should be in
alphabetical order of author. The conventional sequences are as follows:
printed books: author (surname first), title (underlined); editor (if
appropriate); number of volumes (if more than one); place of publication
[colon] publisher [comma] year of publication
articles: author (surname first); title in single inverted commas; title of
periodical (underlined); volume number; date (in parentheses); numbers of
first and last pages of article.
5. Acknowledgements
63
In footnotes and list of sources the student must make clear acknowledgement of ALL
works, reports and sources from the internet used in writing the essay and should not
descend to plagiarism or collusion. S/he should carefully note the University of London
General Regulations for Internal Students, 9.5:
Where the regulations for any qualification provide for part of an
examination to consist of ‘take-away’ papers, essays or other work written in
a candidate’s own time, course-work assessment or any similar form of text,
the work submitted by the candidate must be his own, and any quotation
from the published or unpublished works of other persons must be duly
acknowledged.
Plagiarism is the quotation, verbatim or virtually verbatim, of other people’s work,
published or unpublished, without acknowledgement. Plagiarism carries severe
penalties and may even warrant exclusion from the course. If in doubt about the
protocols of acknowledgement, ask.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism, the act of taking somebody else's work and presenting it as your own, is an
act of academic dishonesty, and Birkbeck takes it very seriously.
Examples of plagiarism include (but are not restricted to):
copying the whole or substantial parts of a paper from a source text (e.g. a web
site, journal article, book or encyclopaedia), without proper acknowledgement
paraphrasing another's piece of work closely, with minor changes but with the
essential meaning, form and/or progression of ideas maintained
piecing together sections of the work of others into a new whole
procuring a paper from a company or essay bank (including Internet sites)
submitting another student's work, with or without that student's knowledge
submitting a paper written by someone else (e.g. a peer or relative) and passing
it off as one's own
representing a piece of joint or group work as one's own.
If you knowingly assist another student to plagiarise (for example, by willingly giving
them your own work to copy from), you are committing an examination offence.
What happens if plagiarism is suspected?
In October 2008, the College introduced a new three stage policy for dealing with
assessment offences. The first stage allows for a very rapid and local determination for
first or minor and uncontested offences. Stage Two allows for a formal Department
investigation, where a student wishes to contest the allegation or penalty, where there
is an allegation of a repeat offence or for more serious cases. Stage Three involves a
centrally convened panel for third and serious offences, dealt with under the code of
Student Discipline.
What if I am worried that I’m not referencing correctly?
Please see your module lecturer or contact a member of the learning support team as
soon as possible. Ignorance to Birkbeck’s commitment to student standards will not be
accepted as an excuse in a plagiarism hearing. The following links from Birkbeck’s
Registry provide some helpful information, but are not intended to replace any
guidelines or tuition provided by the academic staff.
64
General Guidelines
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/support/plagiarism
Plagiarism
http://pps05.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/notice/bkplag.htm– Written for Birkbeck’s Registry.
Plagiarism FAQ
http://turnitin.com/research_site/e_faqs.html – Frequently Asked Questions from Turn It
In.
65
Coursework Submission
(This information is also included in Appendix B)
Please use the School of Arts coversheet for coursework submission and fill in all the
relevant details, including your name and/or student number, the module title and code
(all listed on your student profile), and the title of the assignment as set out on the list of
essay topics. You should also sign the declaration that you are submitting your own,
original own work. Major pieces of work (worth 30%, or more, of the marks for a given
module) should normally be submitted anonymously, but you will be told explicitly if you
are expected to do this, and you may, in any case, choose to submit your work
anonymously (ie using your student number, and not your name, including for the
declaration).
All work should normally be computer-generated (using a format compatible with
Microsoft Word, and not a pdf or similar) unless you are told explicitly that an
assignment may be hand-written. All work should be submitted double-spaced. Please
note that the word count should include footnotes but excludes the bibliography. Ensure
your name and the name of the course at the top of the essay, and include the title of
the essay as set out on the list of essay topics.
Your work should normally be submitted electronically, via Turnitin by 12 noon on the
day of the deadline (or, exceptionally, in case of difficulty with this system, by email to
the lecturer concerned).Your coversheet should be cut and pasted, in Word format only,
into the front of the document you submit (your “signature” may consist of your typed
name or your student number). You may, exceptionally, also be asked to leave a paper
copy in the coursework box in the entrance hall of 43 Gordon Square. You should also
retain a copy yourself. In no circumstances should essays be handed directly to
the lecturer or seminar leader.
Paper copies of coursework should be stapled in the top left-hand corner, with your
completed coversheet forming the top page. It should be placed in an envelope which
is clearly marked with the name of the lecturer and the module title. Please do not put
them in a folder or plastic sleeve: markers prefer to receive work simply stapled.
The Coursework Cover Sheet is available on this link
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/coversheets-for-coursework-submission (or via your
department’s website, and paper copies are available from the entrance hall of 43
Gordon Square).
For further information and instructions on how to submit coursework using Turnitin
please see the appendices or visit the ITS Help Desk.
Return of Coursework
Coursework will normally be marked and returned electronically within 6 weeks from the
stated submission date or the date of handing in, whichever is later. Larger modules
and modules with numerous seminar groups, such as core modules, could take longer
due to the number of students involved. There may also be a delay if the college is
closed or if there are extended holidays during that 6-week period. If you feel that you
66
need feedback about your work sooner due to other impending work, please contact the
lecturer directly to make an appointment to visit within their office hours.
Essays are never sent back to students by post. If online submission/return has
not been used, your lecturer will advise the method by which your work will be
returned – normally via the student pigeonholes at 43 Gordon Square.
Please do not phone/e-mail to ask whether your essay has been marked unless
the marking periods as above have elapsed.
College Assessment Policy
It may also be useful to familiarise yourself with the official college assessment policy.
Please see the following link:
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeOfPractice/section6/COP_AOS.pdf
Late Submission of work for assessment
College policy dictates how Schools will treat work that is due for assessment but is
submitted after the published deadline. From 2008/9 any work that is submitted for
formal assessment after the published deadline is given two marks: a penalty mark of
50% for postgraduate students, assuming it is of a pass standard, and the ‘real’ mark
that would have been awarded if the work had not been late. Both marks are given to
the student on a cover sheet. If the work is not of a pass standard a single mark is
given.
If you submit late work that is to be considered for assessment then you should provide
written documentation, medical or otherwise, to explain why the work was submitted
late. You will need to complete a standard mitigating circumstances pro-forma and
submit it, with documentary evidence as appropriate, to your Tutor or Programme
Director. The case will then be considered by the appropriate sub-board or delegated
panel.
If no case is made then the penalty mark will stand. If a case is made and accepted then
the examination board may allow the ‘real” mark to stand.
Please note:
If you are taking an option within another School please note that you will need to
adhere to the deadline/ extension policy of the School in which the option course is
based. You should submit your essays to the Postgraduate Administrator within English
& Humanities, who will forward it on to the relevant administrator in the host
department.
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Research Ethics
All research involving human participants and confidential materials, carried out by
students in the School of Arts is subject to an ethics approval process. This is to ensure
that the rights of participants and researchers alike are protected at all times, and to
underline our commitment to excellence in research across a wide range of subjects.
If you are undertaking any such research work for a dissertation, project, thesis etc.
please complete the form ‘Proposal for Ethical Review template’ and pass this to your
academic supervisor. The proposal will be reviewed and assessed as ‘routine’ or ‘nonroutine’. In most cases it is envisaged that such work will be routine, and your
supervisor will inform you of the outcome. In a small number of cases, the proposal
may be referred to the School’s Ethics Committee for further consideration. Again, you
will be informed of any outcome.
The proposal form is available through our departmental web pages (current students).
If you have any queries, please speak to your supervisor in the first instance.
Further guidelines are available on the MyBirkbeck website at
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/support/researchethics
68
Grade-Related Criteria
80-100%
High
Distinction
Possesses all the qualities of work of distinction level,
but performed to an exceptional standard in most areas
Demonstrates the potential for publication
70-79%
Distinction
Shows a sophisticated understanding of the topic,
presenting a highly persuasive and original response
Displays an outstandingly perceptive knowledge of the
relevant primary evidence, making creative, incisive
and/or subtle use of that evidence
Presents an elegantly structured argument that displays
sustained critical independence and cogent analysis
Engages critically and imaginatively with secondary
and, where relevant, theoretical literature, moving well
beyond the material presented in classes and
positioning its own argument within academic debates
Deploys a lively and sophisticated prose style with
precision
Demonstrates an advanced command of critical
vocabulary and the rules of grammar, syntax, spelling
and punctuation
Referencing (including quotations, footnotes and
bibliography) immaculately presented according to the
course handbook
60-69%
Merit
Shows a sound understanding of the topic, presenting a
perceptive and relevant response
Displays detailed knowledge of the relevant primary
evidence, making sustained, specific and often
thoughtful use of that evidence
Presents a lucid and well-structured argument that
displays critical independence and effective analysis
Engages critically with secondary and, where relevant,
theoretical literature and/or material from classes, doing
so in the service of an independent argument
Deploys a lucid and fluent prose style
Demonstrates an accurate command of critical
vocabulary and the rules of grammar, syntax, spelling
and punctuation
Referencing (including quotations, footnotes and
bibliography) presented according to the course
handbook
50-59%
Shows some understanding of the topic, and presents a
69
Pass
largely relevant response
Displays adequate knowledge of the relevant primary
evidence under discussion, making appropriate use of that
evidence
Attempts a structured argument, but may be prone to the
general, the arbitrary, the derivative, the incomplete and/or
the descriptive
Makes use of secondary and, where relevant, theoretical
literature (whether critical, theoretical or historical) and
material from lectures and seminars, but not always in the
service of an independent argument
Deploys a fairly fluent prose style
Demonstrates an adequate command of critical vocabulary
and the rules of grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation
Referencing
(including
quotations,
footnotes
and
bibliography) largely presented according to departmental
criteria
0-49%
Fail
Shows a limited or scant understanding of the topic and
presents a less than competent response that lacks focus
Displays a barely adequate or erroneous knowledge of the
primary evidence
Either fails to present an argument or presents one that is
incoherent, incomplete and/or flawed
Makes little or no use of secondary or theoretical literature or
uses it inappropriately and derivatively; is heavily reliant on
material derived from classes without evidence of
independent assimilation or understanding of it.
Deploys an inaccurate and unclear prose style
Demonstrates an insecure command of critical vocabulary
and the rules of grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation
Referencing
(including
quotations,
footnotes
and
bibliography) poorly presented according to departmental
criteria
Notes:
The above table is designed to give an indication of the qualities that are required in the different
MA classifications, and to show the factors that are taken into account when marking MA work.
Frequently, essays do not fall neatly into any one band. For example, an essay might have the
‘lucid and well-structured argument’ of a Merit while deploying the ‘fairly fluent prose style’ of a
Pass. In such cases the marker has to weigh these qualities against each other and strike a
balance in the final mark and classification.
These criteria will be applied when assessing the work of disabled students (including those with
dyslexia), on the assumption that they receive prior learning support. Students who think they
might qualify for support should refer to the Disability Statement in this handbook for further
information.
70
Assessment
All assessed essays are double-marked; a set of comments and a mark are returned to
the student. These marks remain provisional until ratified by the external examiner at
the Board of Examiners’ meeting in November of the following year.
Marking Scale
70-100
Pass with distinction
60-69
Pass with merit
50-59
Pass
Marks below 50 constitute a ‘fail’.
Criteria
To be awarded a PASS at MA level the essay or dissertation should normally:
Present a reasonably clear argument with some level of detail;
Show a fair ability to marshal evidence for the argument, even if this is not sustained
throughout the essay;
Display a reasonably thorough knowledge of the relevant sources and texts and the
ability to analyse them in some detail;
Demonstrate a fair grasp of a reasonable range of critical literature relevant to the
essay topic;
Use appropriate scholarly conventions relating to presentation;
Keep within the word limit;
Be adequately documented, with footnotes or endnotes, and a bibliography that
reveals engagement with relevant primary and secondary texts.
To be awarded a MERIT at MA level the essay or dissertation should normally:
Present a clear and detailed argument;
Marshal a body of evidence for the argument confidently and clearly throughout the
essay;
Display a good knowledge of the relevant sources and texts and a critical
confidence in analysing them in close detail;
Demonstrate a good grasp of a range of critical literature relevant to the essay topic,
including recent work in the field, and be able to engage with, as well as rehearse,
debates on the topic in hand;
Be well written throughout;
Be presented in a proper scholarly fashion throughout;
Keep within the word limit;
Be well documented, with footnotes or endnotes, and a full bibliography that reveals
engagement with relevant primary and secondary texts.
To be awarded a DISTINCTION at MA level the essay or dissertation should
normally:
Fulfil all the criteria of a MERIT essay and, additionally:
71
Show a level of intellectual ambition beyond what is required for a MERIT mark;
Display some evidence of originality in the selection and/or interpretation of sources
and texts and the capacity to intervene actively in a chosen field;
Have a wide range of reference, beyond what is required for a MERIT mark.
Substantially extend the understanding of the topic discussed.
Criteria for Award of Degree
The Dissertation counts for 33%.
The remaining essays (Core, and three Options) count for 67%.
Dissertation Advice
The dissertation should be between 14,000 and 15,000 words. This excludes titles,
diagrams, and bibliography. It must be securely bound (heat-bound or spiral-bound.
Please submit two hard copies and submit the electronic copy via Moodle. Please
remember to keep a copy for yourself.
A dissertation proposal form, to be submitted to the Course Director by 16 th March, is at
the end of this Handbook. The outline is not ‘official’ and may well change. If you have
any difficulties about meeting the deadline contact the course director. Dissertation
research skills classes will be held in the first three weeks of Term 3.
Dissertation supervisors will read up to 3,000 words of the dissertation submitted
by 28 June 2014.
Degree Regulations
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Undergraduate and Postgraduate Study
The majority of Birkbeck’s programmes are offered as part of the College’s Common
Award Scheme (CAS). Programmes will therefore have common regulations, and a
common structure. This will help to ensure greater consistency of practice amongst
programmes and will also make it possible for you to take modules from Departments
across the College which are outside of your normal programme (subject to programme
regulations and timetable constraints).
Some areas covered by CAS Regulations include:
Degree Structure
Degree Classification
Module Weighting
Marking Scheme
Failure and Re-Assessment
Plagiarism and Academic Offences
Mitigating Circumstances.
You are strongly encouraged to read the information provided below, and Appendix
D/E at the end of this handbook. Hard copies are available on request in the School
Administrative Office at 43 Gordon Square.
Further details on programme regulation and areas of interest are available on the
Common Awards Scheme website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reg/regs/cas
Research Ethics
All research involving human participants and confidential materials, carried out by
students in the School of Arts is subject to an ethics approval process. This is to ensure
that the rights of participants and researchers alike are protected at all times, and to
underline our commitment to excellence in research across a wide range of subjects.
If you are undertaking any such research work for a dissertation, project, thesis etc.
please complete the form ‘Proposal for Ethical Review template’ and pass this to your
academic supervisor. The proposal will be reviewed and assessed as ‘routine’ or ‘nonroutine’. In most cases it is envisaged that such work will be routine, and your
supervisor will inform you of the outcome. In a small number of cases, the proposal
may be referred to the School’s Ethics Committee for further consideration. Again, you
will be informed of any outcome.
The proposal form is available through our departmental web pages (current students).
If you have any queries, please speak to your supervisor in the first instance.
Further guidelines are available on the MyBirkbeck website at
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/support/research-ethics.
73
Disability Statement
At Birkbeck there are students with a wide range of disabilities including dyslexia, visual
or hearing impairments, mobility difficulties, mental health needs, medical conditions,
respiratory conditions. Many of them have benefited from the advice and support
provided by the College’s Disability Office.
The Disability Office
The College has a Disability Office located in room G12 on the ground floor of the Malet
Street building. We have a Disability Service Manager, Mark Pimm, a Disability
Administrator, John Muya and a Mental Health Advisor, Elizabeth Hughes. We will
shortly be appointing an SpLD Advisor.
All enquiries should come to the Disability office, who will determine the appropriate
referral to specialist staff. They can provide advice and support on travel and parking,
physical access, the Disabled Students Allowance, special equipment, personal
support, examination arrangements etc. If you have a disability or dyslexia, we
recommend you come to our drop in session where we can discuss support and make
follow up appointments as necessary. The drop-in sessions are between 4pm and 6pm
Monday to Thursday.
The Disability Office can also complete an Individual Student Support Agreement form
with you, confirming your support requirements and send this to your School and
relevant Departments at the College so they are informed of your needs.
Access at Birkbeck
Birkbeck's main buildings have wheelchair access, accessible lifts and toilets, our
reception desks have induction loops for people with hearing impairments and we have
large print and tactile signage. Disabled parking, lockers, specialist seating in lectures
and seminars and portable induction loops can all be arranged by the Disability Office.
The Disabled Students Allowance
UK and most EU students with disabilities on undergraduate and postgraduate courses
are eligible to apply for the Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA). The DSA usually
provides thousands of pounds worth of support and all the evidence shows that
students who receive it are more likely to complete their courses successfully. The
Disability Office can provide further information on the DSA and can assist you in
applying to Student Finance England for this support.
The Personal Assistance Scheme
Some students need a personal assistant to provide support on their course, for
example a note-taker, sign language interpreter, reader, personal assistant, disability
mentor or dyslexia support tutor. Birkbeck uses a specialist agency to recruit Personal
Assistants and they can assist you with recruiting, training and paying your personal
assistant. Please contact the Disability Office for information on this scheme.
74
Support in your School
The provision which can be made for students with disabilities by Schools is set out in
the Procedures for Students with Disabilities. This is available from the Disability Office
and on the disability website (see below).
As mentioned above your School will receive a copy of your Individual Student Support
Agreement from the Disability Office. This will make specific recommendations about
the support you should receive from the School.
Whilst we anticipate that this support will be provided by the Programme Director, tutors
and School Administrator in the School of Arts also has a Student Disability Liaison
Officer. If you experience any difficulties or require additional support from the School
then they may also be able to assist you. They may be contacted through the School
Office or the Disability Office.
Support in IT Services and Library Services
There is a comprehensive range of specialist equipment for students with disabilities in
IT Services. This includes software packages for dyslexic students (e.g. Claroread and
Inspiration), screen reading and character enhancing software for students with visual
impairments, specialist scanning software, large monitors, ergonomic mice and
keyboards, specialist orthopaedic chairs etc. For advice and assistance please contact
Disability IT Support. There is also a range of specialist equipment in the Library
including a CCTV reading machine for visually impaired students as well as specialist
orthopaedic chairs and writing slopes. The Disability Office refers all students with
disabilities to the Library Access Support service who provides a comprehensive range
of services for students with disabilities.
Specific Learning Difficulties (Dyslexia)
Mature students who experienced problems at school are often unaware that these
problems may result from their being dyslexic. Whilst dyslexia cannot be cured, you can
learn strategies, which make studying significantly easier. If you think you may be
dyslexic you should contact the Disability Office who can screen you and where
appropriate refer you to an Educational Psychologist for a dyslexia assessment. These
assessments cost £225. Some students can receive assistance in meeting this cost
from their employer. In exceptional cases students may receive assistance from the
Access to Learning Fund.
Examinations
Students with disabilities and dyslexia may be eligible for special arrangements for
examinations e.g. extra time, use of a word processor, amanuensis, enlarged
examination papers etc. In order to receive special arrangements a student must
provide medical evidence of their disability (or an Educational Psychologists report if
you are dyslexic) to the Disability Office. For School examinations you should contact
your Programme Director to request special arrangements at least 2 weeks before the
examination. For main College summer examinations you are given the opportunity to
declare that you require special provision on your assessment entry form. Students who
require provision should then attend an appointment with the Disability Office to discuss
75
and formalise the appropriate arrangements. The closing date for making special
examination arrangements in College examinations is the 15 th March and beyond this
date consideration will only be given to emergency cases.
Further information
Full information on disability support can be found at:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/disability
For further information or to make an appointment to see the Disability office, please
call the Student Centre on 020 7631 6316 or email [email protected]. Alternatively
you can go to the Disability Office in room G12 between 4pm and 6pm Monday –
Thursday for during their drop-in hours.
76
Student Support and Available Resources
Student Support
Study Skills Programmes
Every Department within the School of Arts has a provision for student support and the
programmes vary as they are targeted at specific degree requirements. Please contact
your administrator if you are having any difficulties in completing your coursework.
There is help available to you at every point in your degree, and we are more than
happy to point you in the right direction.
Learning Support Adviser for the School of Arts, Dr Fleur Rothschild
As Learning Support Adviser, I supplement the help offered by the Departments in the
School of Arts to students in their first year of study. My support takes the form of a
programme of Workshops which continue throughout the academic year and which are
open to all first-year students in the School. These events will provide you with
additional guidance on how to improve specific skills relevant to studying the Arts and
Humanities.
For details of the programme, please visit my website:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/depts-staff/study-skills-and-learning-support-adviser In consultation with
Subject Directors and students’ Personal Tutors, I also extend help to individual firstyear students through an appointment system for one-to-one meetings in my office
(Room 210). I look forward to meeting and introducing myself to you at School of Arts
pre-sessional and Induction events.
Birkbeck College Resources
Birkbeck Library
The College Library (http://www.bbk.ac/lib/) has a solid and growing core of books, journals
and reference. It is primarily an undergraduate library, but through a careful acquisitions
policy we try to provide general resources for MA students (although we cannot guarantee
that the library covers all areas of interest and work). Most of our material is for three week
loan, but we also have material that is one week loan, one day loan and some material
(marked Reference) cannot be borrowed at all.
The long opening hours allow you to borrow books after classes. There is an e-mail and
telephone enquiry, online reservation and online renewal service, an online catalogue
and the eLibrary gives access to electronic resources such as electronic journals
(ejournals), databases and past exam papers.
Should you have any questions about library provision, please contact the Department’s
Library Liaison Representative or the Department’s Subject Librarian.
The Library has a separate periodicals, A/V and “Reading Room Collection”. The latter
consists of photocopies of articles and essential books which have been placed there at
a lecturer’s request and are for reference use only within the Library.
Information about the layout, collections and services, the Library catalogue and access
to the Library’s extensive range of electronic resources is via the Library web site
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/ It is very important to familiarise yourself with this site. Detailed
information about the Library’s resources can be found in the online Subject Guide.
An introduction to the Library and bibliographical skills is timetabled at the start of your
course at which you will meet the Subject Librarian who looks after the collection. They
77
will introduce you to the Library and its electronic resources. In addition, the Library has
an online tutorial called LIFE (Library Induction for Everyone) which is always available:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/life/ which has a module in it on ‘Researching a topic’.
eLibrary
As well as its physical holdings, the Library has a comprehensive range of e-resources
including bibliographic databases (which tell you what has been written on a topic), and
electronic journals. Most of the electronic resources can be accessed from outside the
College using your IT Services username and password. If you did not receive this upon
enrolment, please ask for them at IT Services reception (Malet Street).
LAMP
The LAMP Service (LibrAry Materials by Post) is a subscription based service which enables
you to have books and photocopies of articles posted to your home address. You may find it
particularly useful if you are not able to visit the library frequently. Birkbeck students with
disabilities may be able to join the service for free on the recommendation of the College
Disability Officer, Mark Pimm. If you think you may be eligible for free membership, please first
contact Mark Pimm in the Disability Office.
Interlibrary loans
The College Library also runs an interlibrary loan service to enable you to obtain copies
of books and articles not held in its own collections. As it can take a couple of weeks to
obtain copies of requested materials, you are advised to plan ahead in your general
reading and essay preparation so as to make use of this facility. Please note: a charge
of £1 will be made for each interlibrary loan request received and there is a limit of 10
requests in progress at any one time.
Further information and help
If a book you need is not available in the Library or you require any help using the
resources or finding information, please ask at the enquiry desk (020 7631 6063).
University of London Library
Senate House,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HU
Situated next door to Birkbeck, on the fourth floor of Senate House, this is an excellent
research library with a very good collection of up to date critical material and with
essential journals for research on the Renaissance. It also has a fairly good collection
of early modern English texts in the palaeography room (4th floor). Membership of this
library is vital for your MA.
British Library
96 Euston Road,
St. Pancras
London WC1E 7HU
A copyright library, it receives all new books published in Britain and orders patchily
from Europe and the USA. It has an unrivalled collection on early modern books. These
can be read in the room labelled “Rare Books and Manuscripts”. It also has a map
library and many other resources. Membership is free, and important. To obtain
membership, the current regulations require that you give evidence of needing texts not
available elsewhere.
78
Warburg Institute Library
Woburn Square,
London WC1HOAB
An excellent and fascinating Renaissance collection with much material not available
elsewhere. Students from the Renaissance MA are admitted to the library. You may
need to show a letter from the Postgraduate Administrator.
Institute of Historical Research
Situated on the ground floor of the North Wing of Senate House, the IHR is an excellent
resource for reference and many other materials for the study of early modern Europe
and beyond. In order to join, take your Birkbeck College card to reception and join.
“Connections”, the IHR booklet, will indicate the excellent range of seminars run
through the year.
University College Library
University College is on Gower Street, close to Birkbeck. Students from Birkbeck are
admitted to the library as reference users (no borrowing). It has good collections in the
Renaissance area and some unexpected archives. Check with the library for any
revised visiting arrangements. Make sure you have your Birkbeck College card and a
photograph when you first visit the library.
Wellcome Institute Library
The Wellcome Building,
183 Euston Road,
London NW1 2BE
The Wellcome Institute has a huge collection of literature on medicine and the body.
They also have a museum.
Courtauld Institute of Art Library
Somerset House,
The Strand,
London WC2R 0RN
The Courtauld Institute specialises in Art History. It has excellent literature collections
and an image library.
St Bride Printing Library
Bride Lane, Fleet Street,
London EC4Y 5EE
Material on print.
Guildhall Library
Aldermanbury,
London, EC2Y 8DS
Material on London, print and manuscript. Guilds, shows, etc.,
Electronic Resources
You should familiarise yourself with the ECCO resource (Eighteenth-Century
Collections Online), which is available through the electronic databases offered by the
79
University of London Library at Senate House. This phenomenal resource includes
scanned versions of almost all eighteenth-century books in English. This phenomenal
resource enables you to follow up and check references to eighteenth-century books
easily, to read, but also browse and become familiar with texts that you might not
necessarily have the time to read in detail. Even if you are not keen on reading large
amounts of text from a computer screen, this is a resource that you should try to use.
Once you have joined the Senate House Library you will be able to access it from home
or anywhere you are provided you have your Senate House library username and
barcode. Other electronic resources, such as electronic journals through JSTOR and
Project Muse, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English
Dictionary are available through the Birkbeck Library (you will need your ITS username
and password).
Other Resources and Organisations
Birkbeck Student Union
You are automatically a member of the Birkbeck Students’ Union, the University of
London Union and NUS upon taking up the offer of a place to study at Birkbeck. NUS
cards are available online (NUS Extra) or from the Union Office, Malet Street.
Application can be made to become a member of the International Students’ Association
by completing a form that can also be obtained from their shop.
Location and Telephone: Offices on the 4th Floor of the extension building in Malet
Street. General Union Office is in Room 456, Tel: 020 7631 6335. Enquiries:
[email protected]
Visit the website at http://www.birkbeckunion.org/
Counselling
The Students’ Union offers counselling free of charge.
Birkbeck Evening Nursery
Birkbeck College has an Evening Nursery, which is available for students and current members
of staff and accepts children aged 2-10 years. In exceptional circumstances, children up to 12
will be accepted. However, Nursery Staff reserve the right not to accept older children if they are
disruptive.
Full
details,
including
opening
times,
may
be
found
at:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/nursery
Career Development - Information, Advice, Workshops & Courses
Full information about Careers support for Birkbeck students is available online at
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/careers
1:1 careers coaching is available on Wednesday afternoons from 2-6pm. Usually these
appointments take place at the Malet Street Campus in Talk Room 7 (located on the 4th
floor, next to the Student Union). To book an appointment, please call 020 7863 6030.
The office is open from 9.30am-5pm. Bookings are only taken during the week of the
appointment, so please call on the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday morning of the
week that you would like to see a Careers Consultant. Please note that it is best to call
us on Monday morning as appointments do get booked up quite quickly.
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A number of Careers workshops are available to Birkbeck students on subjects such
as:
Managing your Career
Writing Effective CVs
Completing Job Applications and Preparing for Interviews.
For more information about these (and to book a place) please go to:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/facilities/careers/careers-workshops-1
C2 Education, part of The Careers Group, University of London, offers great expertise
and experience in working with students and graduates of all ages and at all stages of
career development. They offer online careers resources which all students may
access:
Online Careers Resources: http://www.careerstagged.co.uk/
C2 Education website: http://www.thecareersgroup.co.uk/
81
Other Graduate Activities
We have a large postgraduate community, and there are many other arenas you might
wish to participate in. We circulate information by email about interesting and relevant
events taking place in London, and beyond: conferences, readings, exhibitions.
MA Thursday Evening Lectures Programme
We aim to stimulate cross-fertilisation between MA programmes by putting on a series
of lectures by guest speakers, and panels with staff and current graduates, on Thursday
evenings from 7:30. A full programme of speakers should be available from October
and advertised on the department’s website.
Birkbeck Day Conferences
The Department of English & Humanities frequently arrange day conferences (recent
conferences include ‘Remembering the 1990s’, ‘The Inhuman’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Gendering the
Millennium’, ‘Death by Technology’, ‘Magical Thinking’, ‘Narratives in Transition’,
‘Money Talks’, ‘Occasional Music’). Look out for publicity materials in the School. MA
students are very welcome to attend such events.
The Centre for English Studies
The Centre for English Studies is located on the third floor of Senate House, and
provides a structured sequence of seminars, lectures from distinguished speakers, day
conferences and graduate seminars. Many of these are held during the day, but there
are also weekend conferences and late afternoon meetings if you are able to attend.
The Centre releases a batch of material at the beginning of each term, announcing the
programme for the coming weeks: we will normally email you about relevant events.
The Institute for Romance Studies, also located in Senate House, often puts on
lectures and conferences which may be relevant to your studies. Information is
available at Senate House, and also advertised on the notice-board.
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Academic Contacts – all staff located at 43 Gordon Square
Dr Anthony Bale
Dr Nicola Bown
Dr Joseph Brooker
Dr Carolyn Burdett
Dr Luisa Calè
Dr Stephen Clucas
Dr Isabel Davis
Prof Alison Finlay
Dr Anna Hartnell
Prof Esther Leslie
Dr Ann Lewis
Dr Roger Luckhurst
Dr Kate McLoughlin
Dr David McAllister
Kate Retford
Dr Fleur Rothschild
Dr Laura Salisbury
Dr Emily Senior
Silke Arnold de Simine
Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo
Dr Carol Watts
Dr Joanne Winning
Prof Sue Wiseman
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
0207 361 6167
0203 073 8406
0203 073 8415
0203 073 8416
0203 073 8412
0203 073 8421
0203 073 8414
0203 073 8417
0203 073 8413
0203 073 8401
0207631 6178
0203 073 8419
0203 073 8420
0207631 6198
0207 631 6114
0203 073 8411
0203 073 8409
0207 631 6100
0207631 6150
0203 073 8403
0203 073 8410
0203 073 8418
0203 073 8408
For further contact information and information concerning research interests of
our academic staff please see our website at www.bbk.ac.uk/eh where you can
find up-to-date information on our staff page.
Please check office hours with individual staff members. We ask you visit offices only
when you have made an appointment. Please ring or e-mail in advance. Staff members
are available for tutorials at other times by appointment.
Staffing is subject to change and listing in this booklet is not a guarantee that a
specific staff member will be with the Department in the 2013-2014 academic year.
There is a research leave policy in the College, which means that all members of
academic staff are entitled to one term’s research leave every three years. In
addition, members of staff are regularly awarded externally funded research leave,
by organisations such as the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities
Research Council. Therefore, not all academic staff will be present at all times. On
such occasions the Department will arrange replacement cover and advise the
affected students.
Please see our website for queries regarding academic staff’s research interests and
Departmental responsibilities.
83
Appendix A: Term Dates and Deadlines
Autumn Term
Monday 30 September to
Friday 13 December 2013
Week 1
30-Sept-13
Week 2
7-Oct-13
Week 3
14-Oct-13
Week 4
21-Oct-13
Week 5
28-Oct-13
Week 6
4-Nov-13
Week 7
11-Nov-13
Week 8
18-Nov-13
Week 9
25-Nov-13
Week 10
2-Dec-13
Week 11
9-Dec-13
Most services will be
unavailable from 5pm on
Friday 20 December
2013, re-opening at 9am
on Thursday, 2 January
2014
Spring Term
Monday 6 January to
Friday 21 March 2014
Week 1
6-Jan-14
Week 2
13-Jan-14
Week 3
20-Jan-14
Week 4
27-Jan-14
Week 5
3-Feb-14
Week 6
10-Feb-14
Week 7
17-Feb-14
Week 8
24-Feb-14
Week 9
3-Mar-14
Week 10
10-Mar-14
Week 11
17-Mar-14
unavailable from 6pm on
Wednesday 16 April 2014
to Tuesday, 22 April 2013.
Normal services will
resume from 9am on
Wednesday, 23 April
2014.
Summer Term
Monday 28 April to
Friday 11 July 2014
Week 1
28-Apr-14
Week 2
5-May-14
Week 3
12-May-14
Week 4
19-May-14
Week 5
26-May-14
Week 6
2-Jun-14
Week 7
9-Jun-14
Week 8
16-Jun-14
Week 9
23-Jun-14
Week 10
30-Jun-14
Week 11
7-Jul-14
unavailable on Monday 5
May & Monday 27 May
2014
Please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/about-us/term-dates/#term-dates-2013 for full
term dates and holiday closures.
Students are reminded that it is inadvisable to take holidays during term time. Exams
may be held at any point from May-June and times may not be confirmed until the
Summer Term.
84
Appendix B
Policy on Essays and Dissertations for all MA Programmes
in the Department.
Essays
Essays should be 5,000 words long (with the exception of MA Creative Writing components;
word length for each as stated in course literature). Please note that excessively over- or
under-length essays will be penalised. Also, please be aware of the university regulations
against plagiarism and duplication of your own work (i.e. there should be no overlap between
this essay and material presented for assessment elsewhere in this course or in another
module). Please ensure that your essay follows the style of referencing outlined in the MHRA
stylebook. This is available on the web at:
http://mhra.org.uk/publications/books/styleguide/styleguideV1.pdf.
Please use the School of Arts coversheet for coursework submission and fill in all the relevant
details, including your name and/or student number, the module title and code (all listed on your
student profile), and the title of the assignment as set out on the list of essay topics. You should
also sign the declaration that you are submitting your own, original own work.
All work should be submitted double-spaced.
Your work should be submitted electronically, via Turnitin (or, exceptionally, in case of
difficulty with this system, by email to the lecturer concerned). Your coversheet should be cut
and pasted, in Word format only, into the front of the document you submit (your “signature”
may consist of your typed name or your student number). You may, exceptionally, also be
asked to leave a paper copy in the coursework box in the entrance hall of 43 Gordon Square.
You should also retain a copy yourself.
Paper copies of coursework should be stapled in the top left-hand corner, with your completed
coversheet forming the top page. It should be placed in an envelope which is clearly marked
with the name of the lecturer and the module title. Please do not put them in a folder or
plastic sleeve: markers prefer to receive work simply stapled.
For further information and instructions on how to submit coursework using Turnitin
please see the appendices or visit the ITS Help Desk.
Essays are never sent back to students by post. If online submission/return has not been
used, your lecturer will advise the method by which your work will be returned – normally
via the student pigeonholes at 43 Gordon Square.
College policy dictates how Schools will treat work that is due for assessment but is submitted
after the published deadline. From 2008/9 any work that is submitted for formal assessment
after the published deadline is given two marks: a penalty mark of 50% for postgraduate
students, assuming it is of a pass standard, and the ‘real’ mark that would have been awarded if
85
the work had not been late. Both marks are given to the student on a cover sheet. If the work is
not of a pass standard a single mark is given.
If you submit late work that is to be considered for assessment then you should provide written
documentation, medical or otherwise, to explain why the work was submitted late. You will need
to complete a standard mitigating circumstances pro-forma and submit it, with documentary
evidence as appropriate, to your Tutor or Programme Director. The case will then be considered
by the appropriate sub-board or delegated panel.
If no case is made then the penalty mark will stand. If a case is made and accepted then the
examination board may allow the ‘real” mark to stand.
Please note:
If you are taking an option within another School please note that you will need to adhere to the
deadline/ extension policy of the School in which the option course is based. You should submit
your essays to the Postgraduate Administrator within English & Humanities, who will forward it
on to the relevant administrator in the host department.
86
Appendix C: Getting Started with Moodle
Logging in and getting started
All modules within the School of Arts will be using Moodle for coursework submission.
To log in to the VLE you will need your ITS username and password, a computer with a
connection to the internet and a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
If you are having login problems, but your password is working for other
services, please change your password via the online form at
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/its/password (allow one hour after completing this form,
and then log in to the VLE again). If this hasn't resolved the problem please
contact the ITS Helpdesk via email ([email protected]), telephone (020 7631 6543),
or in person (Malet St building, next to the entrance to the Library).
There is support information available in Moodle if you click on the Support menu
and select ‘Moodle Support for Students’.
Contact ITS: You can contact the ITS Helpdesk via email ([email protected]), telephone
(020 7631 6543), or in person (Malet St building, next to the entrance to the Library).
87
Appendix D: Programme Structures and Regulations
(Undergraduate)
Birkbeck, University of London
Common Awards Scheme
Undergraduate Programmes
Introduction
1.
The majority of Birkbeck’s undergraduate programmes are offered as part of the College’s
Common Awards Scheme. Programmes within the Scheme have common regulations, and a
common structure, and this makes it possible for you to take modules from programmes across
the College which are outside of your normal programme (subject to programme regulations and
timetable constraints).
2.
This is a brief introduction to the Common Awards Scheme. Further details on programme
regulation
and
areas
of
interest
are
available
on
the
Registry
website:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/rules
Structure of Programmes
3.
All programmes offered as part of the Common Awards Scheme consist of modules, each of
which is “credit-rated”. In order to achieve your award you will need to gain at least the following,
and meet the requirements outlined in your programme specification:
Qualification
Credits
Minimum at upper
Maximum at lower Number of
needed
level
level
Birkbeck
modules
Honours Degree
360
120 level 6
120 at level 4
(level 4 modules
are not included in
the calculation for
the final
classification)
30 level 5 (120
credit Diplomas
only)
12 modules
Graduate Diploma
90 level 6
Graduate Certificate
90 (some
Birkbeck
Graduate
Diplomas
require 120
credits)
60
45 level 6
15 level 5
2 modules
Foundation Degree
240
90 level 5
120 at level 4
8 modules
Diploma of Higher
Education
240
90 level 5
120 at level 4
8 modules
Certificate of Higher
Education
120
90 level 4
30 at A Level or
NVQ level 3
4 modules
Certificate of
Continuing
Education
60
60 level 4
60 level 4
2 modules
4.
5.
3/4 modules
Each undergraduate degree programme has three levels – level 4 (certificate), level 5
(intermediate) and level 6 (honours). The Common Awards Scheme offers, for undergraduate
programmes, half modules (15 credits), modules (30 credits) or double modules (60 modules).
The detailed requirements for each programme are published in the relevant programme
specification. Each module on a programme is designated as one of the following:
core
the module must be taken and passed to allow the student to
complete the degree
compulsory
the module must be taken, and Programme Regulations must
stipulate the minimum assessment that must be attempted
88
option
students may choose a stipulated number of modules from a range
made available to them. Option modules are clearly identified in
Programme Regulations.
elective
students may replace an option module with modules from another
programme, subject to approval of Programme Directors, availability of
places and timetable requirements.
Modules may also be designated as pre-requisite modules, meaning they must be
taken and passed to allow for progression to a specified follow-up module.
6.
An honours classification may only be awarded for undergraduate honours programmes (single,
joint and major/minor) once the programme requirements have been fulfilled. The degree
classification formula is as follows:
a)
Module results at Level 4 DO NOT contribute to the determination of classification.
b)
Each module has a weighting (w) - level 5 modules have a weighting of 1, and level 6
modules have a weighting of 2.
c)
Each module has a value (v), where v= one thirtieth of the credit value of the module.
d)
Each module has a result (m), assigned by the relevant board of examiners
e)
The weighted average result will be calculated by the sum of the products (w*v*m) for all
level 5 and 6 modules, divided by the sum of the products (w*v)
f)
The final degree classification is decided by the relevant board of examiners – as a guide,
results are usually in line with the following:
First:
70% or above for the average weighted module results
Upper Second:
Lower Second:
Third:
7.
If you have accumulated 300 credits and passed all the prescribed core modules, but have not
fulfilled the requirements for honours then you may be eligible for a pass degree.
8.
Certificates of Higher Education and Diplomas of Higher Education may be awarded with
Distinction, usually where the weighted average of the modules taken exceeds 70%. Full details
on how an award of distinction may be made are available in the Regulations for Taught
Programmes of Study.
9.
Graduate Certificates and Graduate Diplomas may be awarded with Merit or with Distinction. A
Merit is usually awarded where a student has achieved an average result of between 60% and
70% for modules taken at level 6, while a Distinction is usually awarded where a student has
achieved an average result of over 70% for modules taken at level 6. Full details are available in
the Regulations for Taught Programmes of Study.
Failure and Re-assessment of a Module
10.
The Regulations for Taught Programmes of Study outline how a Sub-board of Examiners should
treat a failed module when considering progression and awards. However, each Sub-board of
eExaminers is responsible for judging, within these regulations, whether a fail can be
“compensated” (ie whether you can be awarded credit for that module even if you have not
actually passed), whether you will need to re-take the module (see paragraph 11) or whether you
will be able to attempt a re-assessment (see 12)
11.
For any module on an undergraduate programme, if you fail to pass a module at your first attempt
then you may be “re-assessed” or you may be required to “re-take”. Re-assessment is where a
student will re-attempt a failed element of a failed module; it does not require attendance at
lectures and seminars. A re-take requires attendance at the module’s lectures and seminars as
well as another attempt at the assessment. A decision on whether you will be permitted to be reassessed in one or more elements of a module that has not been passed is at the discretion of
the sub-board of examiners.
12.
A Sub-board of Examiners may offer an alternative form of assessment for failed elements as part
of a re-assessment regime.
13.
The timing of any re-assessment will be at the discretion of the Sub-board of Examiners; this will
normally be either at the next normal assessment opportunity or in some instances before the
beginning of the next academic year.
14.
You will normally be offered three attempts at passing a module (the original attempt plus two
further attempts, each of which will either be a re-assessment or a re-take). After this, if the
module has not been passed it will be classed either as a “compensated fail” (see 15) or a fail. In
89
15.
some cases this will mean that it will not be possible for you to gain the award that you have
registered for; in such cases, your registration will normally be terminated.
If your module result is between 30 and 39% your Board of Examiners may award a
“compensated fail”. This will mean that you retain the module result, but are awarded credit for
that module. A Foundation Degree may be awarded to a student carrying no more than 30 credits
as compensated fail, and a BA / BSc may be awarded to a student carrying no more than 60
credits as compensated fail. A core module may not be treated as a compensated fail; core
modules must be passed in order to gain the award.
90
Common Award Scheme Policies
1.
As part of the introduction of the Common Awards Scheme, the College has implemented a
number of College-wide policies. The full policies can be seen at
Some brief details on key policies are included here:
2.
after the published deadline. Any work that is submitted for formal assessment after the published
deadline is given two marks: a penalty mark of 40% for undergraduate students, assuming it is of
a pass standard, and the ‘real’ mark that would have been awarded if the work had not been late.
Both marks are given to the student on a cover sheet. If the work is not of a pass standard a
single mark is given.
3.
to complete a standard pro-forma and submit it, with documentary evidence as appropriate, to
your Lecturer or Programme Director. The case will then be considered by the appropriate subboard or delegated panel.
4.
If no case is made then the penalty mark will stand. If a case is made and accepted then the
Assessment Offences
5.
6.
7.
The College Policy on Assessment Offences incorporates the College policy on plagiarism.
The policy describes two stages in the process for dealing with assessment offences (which
include plagiarism, collusion, examination offences and other offences). The first stage allows for
a formal school investigation, of an allegation; Stage 2 involves a centrally convened panel for
serious offences, dealt with under the Code of Student Discipline.
The College treats all assessment offences seriously. It makes strenuous efforts to detect
plagiarism, including using web-based software that can provide clear evidence. If you are in any
doubt as to what constitutes acceptable conduct you should consult your personal tutor or
another member of academic staff. The College has a wide range of sanctions that it may apply in
cases of plagiarism, including the termination of a student’s registration in the most serious cases.
Mitigating Circumstances
8.
9.
10.
11
12.
The College Policy on Mitigating Circumstances determines how Sub-boards of examiners will
treat assessment that has been affected by adverse circumstances. Mitigating Circumstances are
defined as unforeseen, unpreventable circumstances that significantly disrupt your performance
in assessment. This should not be confused with long term issues such as medical conditions, for
which the College can make adjustments before assessment (for guidance on how arrangements
can be made in these cases please see the College’s Procedures for Dealing with Special
Examination Arrangements).
A Mitigating Circumstances claim should be submitted if valid detrimental circumstances result in:
a) the late or non-submission of assessment;
b) non-attendance at examination(s);
c) poor performance in assessment.
For a claim to be accepted you must produce independent documentary evidence to show that
the circumstances:
a) have detrimentally affected your performance or will do so, with respect to 9a, 9b and 9c
above;
b) were unforeseen;
c) were out of your control and could not have been prevented;
d) relate directly to the timing of the assessment affected.
Documentation should be presented, wherever possible, on the official headed paper of the
issuing body, and should normally include the dates of the period in which the circumstances
applied. Copies of documentary evidence will not normally be accepted. If you need an original
document for another purpose, you should bring the original into the Departmental Office so that
a copy can be made by a member of College staff. (Where a photocopy is made by a member of
staff they should indicate on the copy that they have seen the original).
Discussing your claim with a member of staff does not constitute a submission of a claim of
mitigating circumstances.
91
13.
14.
15.
You are encouraged to submit your claim for mitigating circumstances in advance and at the
earliest opportunity. The final deadline for submission of a claim is normally 1 week after the final
examination unless otherwise stated by your Department. Where possible, claims should be
submitted using the standard College Mitigating Circumstances claim form (available from your
Department office) which should be submitted in accordance with the procedure for submission
published by your Department. Claims should always be supported by appropriate documentary
evidence.
You should be aware that individual marks will almost never be changed in the light of mitigating
circumstances. Assessment is designed to test your achievement rather than your potential; it is
not normally possible to gauge what you would have achieved had mitigating circumstances not
arisen. Where mitigating circumstances are accepted, and it is judged by an examination board
that these circumstances were sufficiently severe to have affected your performance in
assessment the usual response will be to offer you another opportunity for assessment without
penalty, at the next available opportunity.
Guidance on what may constitute acceptable mitigating circumstances is available as an
appendix to the policy, available from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/rules or your
Departmental office; you should note that this is not an exhaustive list, and that each case will be
treated on its merits by the relevant sub-board or delegated body.
Break-in-Studies Policy
16.
The Common Awards Scheme regulations allow you to suspend studies for a maximum of two
years in total during your programme of study. This may be for one period of two years, or for
non-consecutive shorter periods (see 17) that add up to a total of two years or less.
17.
Any break-in-studies on an undergraduate programme would normally be for a minimum of one
year; breaks may also be permitted for a period of one or two terms, dependent on the structure
of the programme.
18.
Any application for a break-in-studies should be made in writing to your programme director or
personal tutor. If you are applying for an approved break-in-studies, you should give details of the
length of the proposed break and the reasons for the application.
19.
You will not be liable for fees while on an approved break-in-studies. If you have attended for part
of a term you will normally be liable for the fees due in that term.
20.
If you are on a break-in-studies you will not have access to the Library or ITS unless you make
an application and pay the appropriate fee to use these facilities. Applications must be made
directly to the Library and/or ITS.
21.
If you do not re-enrol after having completed two years of break-in-studies you will be deemed to
have withdrawn from your programme. If you wish to resume your programme after having been
withdrawn, you will normally be required to re-apply for admission.
Other Policies
22.
In addition to the policies above, other College academic-related policies include:
Accredited Prior Learning
Termination of Registration
Procedures for Dealing with Special Examination Arrangements
Suspension of Regulations
The Operation of Boards and Sub-Boards of Examiners
The Role of External & Intercollegiate Examiners
Marking and Moderation
Feedback on Assessment
To see these policies, please see the Common Awards Scheme website:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reg/regs
23.
The College also operates a Procedure for Appeals Against Decisions of Boards of Examiners;
this is also available from this website.
May 2011
92
Appendix E: Programme Structures and Regulations Postgraduate
Birkbeck, University of London
Common Awards Scheme
Postgraduate Programmes
Introduction
1.
The majority of Birkbeck’s postgraduate programmes are offered as part of the College’s
Common Awards Scheme. Programmes within the Scheme have common regulations, and a
common structure, and this makes it possible for you to take modules from other programmes
across the College (subject to programme regulations and timetable constraints).
2.
This paper gives a brief introduction to the Common Awards Scheme. Further details on
regulations and policies that form the Common Awards Scheme can be accessed via:
Structure of Programmes
3.
All programmes offered as part of the Common Awards Scheme consist of modules, each of
which are “credit-rated”. In order to achieve your award you will need to gain at least the
following, and meet the requirements outlined in your programme specification:
Qualification
Credits
Min at
Max at lower
Birkbeck
needed
upper level
level
common
awards
schemes
Masters Degree 180
150 level 7
30 level 6 (not
4 modules plus
included in
dissertation
calculation of
classification)
Postgraduate
120
90 level 7
30 level 6 (not
4 modules
Diploma
included in
calculation of
classification)
Postgraduate
60
60 level 7
n/a
2 modules
Certificate
4.
The Common Awards Scheme offers, for postgraduate programmes, half modules (15 credits),
modules (30 credits), double modules (60 credits), or exceptionally triple modules (90 credits) and
quadruple modules (120 credits – normally for MRes dissertations)
5.
The detailed requirements for each programme are published in the relevant programme
specification. Each module on a programme is designated as one of the following:
core
the module must be taken and passed to allow the student to
complete the degree
compulsory
the module must be taken, and Programme Regulations must
stipulate the minimum assessment that must be attempted
option
students may choose a stipulated number of modules from a range
made available to them. Option modules are clearly identified in
Programme Regulations.
elective
students may replace an option module with modules from another
programme, subject to approval of Programme Directors, availability of
places and timetable requirements.
Modules may also be designated as pre-requisite modules, meaning they must be
taken and passed to allow for progression to a specified follow-up module.
6.
Postgraduate awards may be made with Merit or Distinction. Distinctions are normally awarded to
students who achieve an average result of 70% or more, including a mark of 70 or over in their
dissertation, for all level 7 modules on their programme. A Merit is normally awarded to students
who achieve an average result of 60% or more, but less than 70% for all level 7 modules. Level 6
modules included as part of the programme are not included in the calculation for degree
classification for postgraduate programmes.
93
Failure and Re-assessment of a Module
7.
The Regulations for Taught Programmes of Study outline how an examination board should treat
a failed module when considering progression and awards. However, each examination board is
responsible for judging, within these regulations, whether a fail can be “compensated” (ie whether
you can be awarded credit for that module even if you have not actually passed), whether you will
need to re-take the module (see paragraph 8) or whether you will be able to attempt a reassessment (see paragraph 9)
8.
For any module on a postgraduate programme, if you fail to pass at the first attempt then any
subsequent attempt will either be a “re-take” or a “re-assessment”. A re-take requires attendance
at the module’s lectures and seminars as well as another attempt at the assessment, whereas
“re-assessment” is where a student attempts only the failed element(s) of a failed module. The
decision on whether you will be offered a re-take or re-assessment will be made by your subboard of examiners.
9.
A Sub-board of Examiners may offer an alternative form of assessment for failed elements as part
of a re-assessment regime.
10.
The timing of any re-assessment will be at the discretion of the Sub-board of Examiners; this will
normally be either at the next normal assessment opportunity or in some instances before the
beginning of the next academic year.
11.
You will normally be offered two attempts at passing a module (the original attempt plus one
further attempt which will either be a re-assessment or a re-take). After this, if the module has not
been passed it will be classed either as a “compensated fail” (see 12) or a fail. In some cases this
will mean that it will not be possible for you to gain the award that you have registered for; in such
cases, your registration will normally be terminated.
12.
If your module result is between 40 and 49% your Sub-board of Examiners may award a
“compensated fail”. This will mean that you retain the module result, but are awarded credit for
that module. An MA or MSc may be awarded to a student carrying no more than 30 credits as
compensated fail. A core module may not be treated as a compensated fail; core modules must
be passed in order to gain the award. The awards of MRes, Postgraduate Diploma or
Postgraduate Certificate do not normally permit the inclusion of compensated fail results in the
calculation of classification
Common Award Scheme Policies
1.
As part of the introduction of the Common Awards Scheme, the College has implemented a
number of College-wide policies. The full policies can be seen at
Some brief details on key policies are included here:
2.
after the published deadline. Any work that is submitted for formal assessment after the published
deadline is given two marks: a penalty mark of 50% for postgraduate students, assuming it is of a
pass standard, and the ‘real’ mark that would have been awarded if the work had not been late.
Both marks are given to the student on a cover sheet. If the work is not of a pass standard a
single mark is given.
3.
to complete a standard pro-forma and submit it, with documentary evidence as appropriate, to
your Lecturer or Programme Director. The case will then be considered by the appropriate subboard or delegated panel.
4.
If no case is made then the penalty mark will stand. If the case is made and accepted then the
Assessment Offences
5.
6.
7.
The College Policy on Assessment Offences incorporates the College policy on plagiarism.
The policy describes two stages in the process for dealing with assessment offences (which
include plagiarism, collusion, examination offences and other offences). The first stage allows for
a formal school investigation into the alleged offence. Stage 2 involves a centrally convened
panel for more serious offences, dealt with under the Code of Student Discipline.
The College treats all assessment offences seriously. It makes strenuous efforts to detect
plagiarism, including using web-based software that can provide clear evidence. If you are in any
doubt as to what constitutes acceptable conduct you should consult your personal tutor or
94
another member of academic staff. The College has a wide range of sanctions that it may apply in
cases of plagiarism, including the termination of a student’s registration in the most serious cases.
Mitigating Circumstances
8.
9.
The College Policy on Mitigating Circumstances determines how Sub-boards of Examiners will
treat assessment that has been affected by adverse circumstances. Mitigating Circumstances are
defined as unforeseen, unpreventable circumstances that significantly disrupt your performance
in assessment. This should not be confused with long term issues such as medical conditions, for
which the College can make adjustments before assessment (for guidance on how arrangements
can be made in these cases please see the College’s Procedures for Dealing with Special
Examination Arrangements).
A Mitigating Circumstances claim should be submitted if valid detrimental circumstances result in:
a) the late or non-submission of assessment;
b) non-attendance at examination(s);
c) poor performance in assessment.
10.
For a claim to be accepted you must produce independent documentary evidence to show that
the circumstances:
a) have detrimentally affected your performance or will do so, with respect to 9a, 9b and 9c
above;
b) were unforeseen;
c) were out of your control and could not have been prevented;
d) relate directly to the timing of the assessment affected.
11
Documentation should be presented, wherever possible, on the official headed paper of the
issuing body, and should normally include the dates of the period in which the circumstances
applied. Copies of documentary evidence will not normally be accepted. If you need an original
document for another purpose, you should bring the original into the Departmental Office so that
a copy can be made by a member of College staff. (Where a photocopy is made by a member of
staff they should indicate on the copy that they have seen the original).
12.
Discussing your claim with a member of staff does not constitute a submission of a claim of
mitigating circumstances.
13.
You are encouraged to submit your claim for mitigating circumstances in advance and at the
earliest opportunity. The final deadline for submission of a claim is normally 1 week after the final
examination unless otherwise stated by your Department. Where possible, claims should be
submitted using the standard College Mitigating Circumstances claim form (available from your
Departmental office) which should be submitted in accordance with the procedure for submission
published by your Department. Claims should always be supported by appropriate documentary
evidence.
14.
You should be aware that individual marks will almost never be changed in the light of mitigating
circumstances. Assessment is designed to test your achievement rather than your potential; it is
not normally possible to gauge what you would have achieved had mitigating circumstances not
arisen. Where mitigating circumstances are accepted, and it is judged by an Sub-board of
Examiners that these circumstances were sufficiently severe to have affected your performance
in assessment the usual response will be to offer you another opportunity for assessment without
penalty, at the next available opportunity.
15.
Guidance on what may constitute acceptable mitigating circumstances is available as an
appendix to the policy, available from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mybirkbeck/services/rules or
your Departmental office; you should note that this is not an exhaustive list, and that each case
will be treated on its merits by the relevant sub-board or delegated body.
16.
You should note that decisions on mitigating circumstances are the responsibility of the sub-board
for your programme. Where you are taking an elective or other module offered by another
department or school, any application for mitigating circumstances should be to your “home”
department.
Break-in-Studies Policy
17.
The Common Awards Scheme regulations allow you to suspend studies for a maximum of two
years in total during your programme of study. This may be for one period of two years or for nonconsecutive shorter periods (see 18) that add up to a total of two years or less.
18.
Any break-in-studies on a postgraduate programme would normally be for a minimum of one
year; breaks may also be permitted for a period of one or two terms, dependent on the structure
of the programme.
95
19.
Any application for a break-in-studies should be made in writing to your programme director or
personal tutor. If you are applying for an approved break-in-studies, you should give details of the
length of the proposed break and the reasons for the application.
20.
You will not be liable for fees while on an approved break-in-studies. If you have attended for part
of a term you will normally be liable for the fees due in that term, unless there are mitigating
circumstances.
21.
If you are on a break-in-studies you will not have access to the Library or ITS unless you make
an application and pay the appropriate fee to use these facilities. Applications must be made
directly to the Library and/or ITS.
22.
If you do not re-enrol after having completed two years of break-in-studies you will be deemed to
have withdrawn from your programme. If you wish to resume your programme after having been
withdrawn, you will normally be required to re-apply for admission.
Other Policies
22.
In addition to the policies above, other College academic-related policies include:
Accredited Prior Learning
Termination of Registration
Procedures for Dealing with Special Examination Arrangements
Suspension of Regulations
The Operation of Boards and Sub-Boards of Examiners
The Role of External & Intercollegiate Examiners
Marking and Moderation
Feedback on Assessment
To see these policies, please see the Common Awards Scheme website:
23.
The College also operates a Procedure for Appeals Against Decisions of Boards of Examiners;
this is also available from this website.
May 2011
96
Appendix F: Campus Map
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps/centrallondon.pdf
97
MA ROMANTIC STUDIES PROGRAMME 2013-14
DISSERTATION PROPOSAL FORM
This form must be returned to Annmarie Shadie Postgraduate Administrator by
Friday 31st January 2014
Name:
Supervisor:
__________________________________
__________________________________
Telephone: _______________________
E-mail:
_______________________
Proposed topic:
Brief Outline/ Abstract
Continue over page (if necessary)
98
Brief indicative reading list/sources to be used
99

Table of Contents - Birkbeck, University of London

Transcription

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