Proseminar: Victorian women, Victorian feminists

General information

Course type	AMUPIE
Module title	Proseminar: Victorian women, Victorian feminists
Language	English
Module lecturer	dr hab. Agnieszka Setecka, prof. UAM
Lecturer's email	saga@amu.edu.pl
Lecturer position	Professor
Faculty	Faculty of English
Semester	2022/2023 (summer)
Duration	30
ECTS	4
USOS code	15-PRO-V-AMU-PIE-11

to acquaint students with selected examples of literary and non-literary texts concerning the “Woman Question” in the Victorian period
to develop the skill of critical analysis of literary and non-literary texts
to develop the group discussion skills and teamwork
to develop writing skills and presenting the results of literary analysis in a written form;

students should have high level of English required to read literary works and critical sources
students should have former experience in analysing literary texts (acquired, for example, during other courses in literary or cultural studies)

Week 1: Introduction to the course: the Victorian period, “the Woman Question”, feminism

Week 2: Writing about women’s rights before the Victorian period: A Vindication

of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (fragments)

Week 3: John Ruskin’s ideal of femininity and the figure of an “Angel in the House”

Week 4: Early Victorian women writers: work, education, legal and economic situation of women

Week 5: Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre and the challenge to the Victorian ideal

Week 6: Critical response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Week 7: Selected fragments from other novels by Brontë sisters

Week 8: George Eliot: Mill on the Floss (fragments) and the Woman Question

Week 9: Critical response to George Eliot’s writing

Week 10: Women writers in autobiographical texts and letters

Week 11: The Langham Place Circle: Women’s political activism and writing

Week 12: New Women writers: selected fragments from the fiction of New Women writers

Week 13: Afterword: A Room of Her Own by Virginia Woolf (fragments)

Week 14: A Neo-Victorian revision of the Woman Question debate (on the basis of a selected text)

Week 15: A concluding discussion

Selected fragments from:

Thompson, Nicola Diane and Gillian Beer (eds.) 1999. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Cambridge University Press.

King, Jeannette (ed.) 2005. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan

The literary texts and other sources discussed in class