Classic Children's Literature
Module Code: to be announced
Module Convenor: Dr Peter Merchant|
This option module is open to all MA students.
This module pieces together rigorous readings of an agreed nucleus of representative texts, with a view to identifying and analysing some significant patterns or trends in children's literature during its historic heyday in the Victorian period. Established children's classics from this period will wherever possible be combined in unusual ways or with unfamiliar accompanying texts. The module focusses on the points at which and the ways in which the course of 'mainstream' Victorian literature was altered by its inclusion of – or struggles with – the consciousness of the child. By also equipping students to tease out of the children's literature of this period some of the cultural anxieties which are more systematically treated in that mainstream, it enables them to fasten connections across the nineteenth-century literary landscape and enhances and enlarges their knowledge of the Victorian age generally.
Assessment
600 word research essay proposal (15%)
3,400 word research essay (85%)
Illustrative Module Texts
Texts will be chosen from a list which may include but is not restricted to:
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper
F. Anstey, Vice Versâ
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines