Victorian Gothic: History, Literature and Culture (Distance Learning)

Overview

Victorian society and culture was a contradiction – an era of bold vision and technological wonders entwined with deep social fears and cultural anxieties.

Why do we associate the Victorians with darkness, sin, hypocrisy and monstrosity? Why does the Gothic seem to best encapsulate how we think about and remember the Victorians? These are some of the questions you'll explore on this course.

This MA explores not just 19th-century Gothic cultures but, more generally, the fears, wonders, and dark imagination of the Victorian era. Through a rich and fascinating range of historical, literary and folkloric texts, themes and approaches, you'll probe the darker side of the Victorian age.

The course gives you access to a wealth of online resources and digitised archival material relating to Victorian culture and draws on local literary and cultural resources, such as the Conan Doyle Collection (Lancelyn Green Bequest) in Portsmouth’s Central Library. You'll have the freedom and scope to pursue your own areas of interest and research via an individual research project and 15,000-word dissertation.

What you'll experience

On this course you'll:

• Be taught by experts from both the history and English departments at the University of Portsmouth

• Develop your research skills, critical thinking and literary analysis

• Work through 2 core content modules, focussed on the cultural tensions between Victorian anxieties (crime, poverty, slums, and degeneration) and Victorian enchantment (stage magic, spiritualism and the occult, the development of Victorian celebrity culture, the struggle of intellect to break from folkloric magic and supernatural superstition in a ‘modern’ age)

• Use our Library’s wealth of online archival material including London Low Life, Victorian Popular Culture, The Old Bailey Online, The Charles Booth Archive, and the British Library Newspaper Archive

• Have opportunities to undertake research in the Charles Dickens Collection and Arthur Conan Doyle Collection (Lancelyn Green Bequest), both housed in the Portsmouth Central Library, Portsmouth

• Get to study any topic of interest within the broad scope of the Victorian Gothic and the history of Victorian culture

• Be able to base your studies around more recent Neo-Victorian re-imaginings of the nineteenth century in their research projects, exploring areas such as crime or supernatural fictions, or steampunk culture

• Get to take optional field trips

Careers and opportunities

As well as giving you greater expertise in the field of Victorian Gothic literature, this course also enhances your knowledge and skill in other areas. During this course, you'll:

• develop the skillset required to work in the heritage industry, the arts and media

• develop a strong grounding for pursuing more advanced levels of academic study, including PhDs and careers in academia

• have the opportunity to gain experience in event organisation, voluntary work, management and promotion, such as for local cultural events, for example, Portsmouth DarkFest

• improve your broader academic skills, such as the ability to analyse, assess, synthesise and evaluate

• develop your archival and research skills, as well as data analysis and interpretation abilities

• improve your oral and written communication, time and workload management, and other transferable skills

After you leave the University, you can get help, advice and support for up to 5 years from our Careers and Employability service as you advance in your career.

There is plenty of help and advice on hand for international students that start from their arrival in Portsmouth. The university operates an orientation week that helps students find their way around the university and explore the services on offer. This also introduces them to the support services including those for academic and wider life and even meeting up with other students. These events are organised by the International Office, based within the Nuffield Centre who also organise events during the year and are point of call for international students. The Students Union offer a wide range of services as well as organising the clubs and societies for students to get involved with outside the classroom. The union was the first in England and Wales to register as a full charity in 2006 but has been in operation since at least 1911, when it published a magazine called The Galleon. It is now based in a building at the northern end of Ravelin Park and includes a student activities centre, a social learning space, a bar and a radio station. The clubs and societies at the university are organised into five different bodies: the Athletic Union, Societies, Student Media, Volunteering and RAG (Raising and Giving). There are some 40 plus sports clubs ranging from football and rugby to lacrosse, pole dancing and octopush, a type of underwater hockey. Societies includes everything from politics and lifestyle groups to a law society as well as the longest running paintball club in the UK.