WA - 3BA ESLC (2025/26)

Victorian literature and culture: the study of Charles Dickens’s Great Epectations

The seminar aims to respond to the still growing fascination with Victorian literature and culture evident in neo-Victorian literature, films and even fashion. It will concentrate on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), which will be analysed in its cultural context and treated as a source of information on Victorian culture and literary conventions. I propose reading the novel in parts, to reflect the way it was originally published, and treating each part as a point of departure for discussing an aspect of Victorian culture, ranging from the Victorian imperialism, laws concerning women, legitimacy, inheritance, Victorian sensationalism, the construction of class, to realism in fiction. This is why the reading of the novel will be accompanied by other materials, including but not limited to literary and non-literary texts from the period.

The aim of this seminar is to expand students’ knowledge of Victorian literature and culture, to expose the all too frequent stereotypes and myths about the period and to provide a wider literary and cultural context for Victorian literature. Students will also learn to understand cultural signs and improve their skills of analysing literary (and non-literary) texts.