Course finder

<< return to browsing

Semester 2

'We are [not] Amused': Victorian Comic Literature (ENLI10249)

Course Website

https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours

Subject

English Literature

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 4 English Literature courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses, and we do not consider civilisation & other interdisciplinary courses, freshman seminars, writing/composition courses or film/cinema/media courses; visiting students who have taken multiple courses in literature in other languages, should have passed at least two courses in English Literature as well. **Please note that this course may incur additional costs to purchase core texts** **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

Although comedy has played a major part in culture since at least the classical period, it is relatively little studied at university level. Other than its appearance in courses focused on the age of Shakespeare, comedy typically remains on the margin of the formal study of literature. This course therefore offers an excellent opportunity to rectify this omission by examining British comic culture during a key literary period. As the title of the course suggests, we are perhaps conditioned to think of our Victorian forebears as humourless individuals, but the texts we will study on this course challenge this preconception. The material examined will underline the remarkable variety of Victorian comedy: examples will include the prose fiction of Dickens and Thackeray, the nonsense verse of Carroll and Lear, the often outrageous songs of the Victorian music hall, and the new forms of comedy which appeared at the end of the century and were epitomised in the drama of Oscar Wilde.

Course Description

While this course is based around primary Victorian comic texts, it is designed to allow students to understand and apply key concepts in the wider study of comedy: these include forms such as irony, satire, farce, comedy of manners, parody, and black comedy; and theoretical concepts in comedy, such as superiority, incongruity, and relief theories. We will also have the opportunity to study the work of key comedy theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson. **This course is designed to inform and complement the study of comedy across other literary periods. The student completing this course will also gain experience of a wide variety of textual forms (novels, short stories, plays, poetry, song lyrics) and will understand how to incorporate these diverse forms into critical debates. In addition, the chronological nature of this course will allow students to trace the ways in which a major literary genre is subject to change over a major literary era.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on an English Literature exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year English Literature course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed, and students will not be permitted to enrol in three 3rd year English Literature courses in the same semester at any time. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

view the timetable and further details for this course