Love and Death: The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France

Module code: EN3078

Module co-ordinator: Dr Mark Rawlinson

This module introduces students to the European realist tradition through the study of major Russian and French novels in translation. It develops an appreciation and understanding of the variety and complexity of realist forms and subject matter, together with a critical vocabulary with which to evaluate and compare realist fictions. 

Aims

The module aims to enrich students' experience of literary culture and to engage them critically with novels that rigorously examine the way we live.

Students will study:

  • Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
  • Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
  • Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
  • Balzac's Père Goriot
  • Flaubert's Madame Bovary
  • Zola's L'assommoir 

These novels will be approached from a number of perspectives, including:

  • Their relationship to the national cultures within which they were produced
  • Their relationship to each other (cross-culturally and in terms of the development of realism and fictional narrative forms)
  • Their relationship to us as readers

Private study of the novels is supported by tutor-led seminars, in which students have the opportunity to develop their knowledge and understanding of both texts and contexts. Seminars are timetabled to permit preparatory reading of substantial novels and the closer scrutiny of issues raised in earlier discussion. Directed reading in literary criticism, historical and theoretical accounts of realism, and background sources on French and Russian culture, society, and history, will support your exploration of issues that emerge in the group's responses to the literature.

By the end of the module, you will be able to...

  • Describe and analyse, in a clear and concise manner, the formal and thematic characteristics of a range of realist novels
  • Compare the themes and narrative devices of authors across the nineteenth century and between cultures
  • Describe and explain the variety of forms, contents, and effects of the realist novel
  • Communicate an appreciation of the imaginative, aesthetic, and moral richness and complexity of the texts studied and their continuing trans-cultural significance as literary models and sources of pleasure and instruction

Assessment

An essay of not more than 5,000 words.

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