Course Details in 2025/26 Session

Module Title	LH Senses of the Past: Historical Fiction in the Long Nineteenth Century
School	Eng, Drama, & Creative Studies
Department	English Literature
Module Code	09 28666
Module Lead	Oliver Herford
Level	Honours Level
Credits	20
Semester	Semester 1
Pre-requisites
Co-requisites
Restrictions	None
Exclusions
Description	This module offers students the chance to explore representations of the historical past in the prose literature of the long nineteenth century.We will be concentrating above all on the historical novel, a genre that emerged and achieved vast popularity during this period, but we will also consider examples of shorter fictional forms (novellas, stories and sketches), as well as writings that play along the border between fiction and the factual. Students will read the work of both British and American writers, ranging across the Romantic and Victorian periods: authors studied may include Walter Scott, James Hogg, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. The set primary works for the module will be studied alongside a rich array of contemporary print sources, nineteenth-century history and historiography, and modern critical and theoretical approaches to historical fiction. There will be a recurring emphasis on the writing of wars, revolutions and popular uprisings, and on concomitant questions of national and historical rupture, as well as on the efforts of fictional writings to restore or make up for past losses, to bridge or jump over (or side-step) ruptures in the texture of past time. Related topics for consideration will include: the impact of human history on places and ecosystems, the interactions of oral and written history, the romance of antiquarian scholarship, literary biography and book-history, superstition and the persistence of the supernatural, the progress of civilization and the costs of that progress, and the recreational appropriation of the past as a field for adventure or a tourist destination. Throughout the module we will be asking how nineteenth-century historical fictions attempt to register the ideological and stylistic differences of the past while also bringing it into imaginative reach of the present.
Learning Outcomes	By the end of the module students should be able to: Conduct informed discussions about the formal, referential, stylistic, and thematic features of a broad range of nineteenth-century historical fictions; Engage in close literary analysis of these works, and contextualize them with reference to contemporary sources and nineteenth-century practices of historiography; Demonstrate their knowledge and interpretive skills in cogent written arguments that engage with relevant primary and secondary materials; Apply and reflect on modern critical and theoretical approaches to nineteenth-century historical fiction.
Assessment	28666-01 : essay 4,000 : Coursework (100%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions	1 x 4,000-word essay
Other	None
Reading List