1106-3: Serial Victorians: The Nineteenth Century on Television
mittwochs, 11.15 – 12.45 Uhr, Seminargebäude S 125, Dietmar Böhnke
Recommended preparation: revision of knowledge on the Victorian Age
Reading list:
Feldmann, D. and C. Krug, eds. (2013), Viktorianismus: Eine literatur- und kulturwissen-schaftliche Einführung. Erich Schmidt; Heilmann, A. and M. Llewellyn (2010), Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Kleinecke-Bates, I. (2014), Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television, 1994-2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Primorac, A. (2018). Neo-Victorianism on Screen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan; Schleich, M. and J. Nesselhauf (2016), Fernsehserien: Geschichte, Theorie, Narration. Stuttgart: UTB; Steinbach, S. (2012), Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture & Society in C19 Britain. London: Routledge; Tomaiuolo, S. (2018), Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgress-ion, Innovation. Cham: Palgrave; Wells-Lassagne, S. and E. Voigts, ed. (2021), Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations. Trier: WVT.
Exam: research project in this class or in 1106-2
The Victorians can be said to have invented serialisation. Writers like Charles Dickens started to publish their novels in instalments in the new mass-market newspapers and magazines in the middle of the nineteenth century, thereby inventing new narrative elements such as the cliffhanger. It is no surprise, therefore, that television adaptations of those novels are still among the staples of contemporary television fare (such as the BBC’s serializations of Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Lark Rise to Candleford, The Moonstone, The Woman in White, A Christmas Carol or the more experimental Dickensian, and ITV’s Doctor Thorne). More broadly, however, it seems that the Victorian Age has never been more popular in a variety of television serials that investigate the period in new and innovative ways, such as the BBC’s Desperate Romantics, The Paradise, Ripper Street and Gentleman Jack, Channel 4’s 1900 House and The Mill, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, ITV’s Victoria and Jericho, Netflix’s The English Game or even Amazon Prime’s Carnival Row. In addition, there are several mini-series adapted from neo-Victorian novels, such as Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, Arthur & George, The Long Song, The Crimson Petal and the White and The Luminaries. In this course, we are going to explore and analyse the “virtual Victorianism” as exemplified in some of these series (you are welcome to add your own examples). We will be interested both in the specific representation of the various cultures and identities of the British nineteenth century from a contemporary perspective and in the media/television/serialisation aspect of these texts. At the same time, we want to find out how exactly the research field of ‘neo-Victorian studies’ approaches this phenomenon, and what we can learn for our own research from this (e.g. term papers, BA theses, projects/presentations etc.).
- Trainer/in: Böhnke Dietmar