At the end of the 19th century, Britain was in many ways at the pinnacle of its power, having established global supremacy thanks to advances in industrialisation and its vast colonial empire. However, cultural texts from the period project a number of profound anxieties about deviancy, degeneracy, decadence, and indistinct threats from adversaries both at home and abroad. Sociopolitical reasons for these uncertainties include the suffragette movement, socialist and anarchist action, campaigns for national self-determination in the form of e.g. Irish Republicanism or the Indian National Congress, as well as geopolitical tensions and technological changes. In this class, we examine narratives that represent, respond to, and process late Victorian cultural anxieties with a particular view to the violence that results from perceived threats to cultural hegemony. We situate a number of late Victorian novels in relation to emergent contemporary concepts such as (social) Darwinism, the unconscious, and (homo)sexuality, exploring how these concepts both shaped and were shaped by cultural anxiety. Additionally, we adopt frameworks from more recent theoretical approaches such as postcolonial and trans*queer studies to understand how cultural anxieties negotiate the boundaries between normative structures and their Other. Primary texts: Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 1891 Florence Marryat: The Blood of the Vampire, 1897 Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1899 All secondary texts will be made available on Moodle.
Die Veranstaltung wurde 1 mal im Vorlesungsverzeichnis SoSe 2024 gefunden:
