MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Crime! Uncanny Places in Victorian and Edwardian Literature

This course aims at introducing and analysing some of the best known, most translated and adapted texts of the long nineteenth century. We shall focus on issues related to crime, detective fiction, science and the uncanny spaces of Victorian culture. We shall read texts which deal with real and plausible events in a culture erceiving itself as forever under attack from atavistic traces of the primitive past and inconceivable forces of the ever-changing present. We shall follow such traces of mystery and crime through sensation fiction in the Sixties (M. E. Braddon), through the new born detective and police fiction (W. Collins, A. Conan Doyle) with texts narrating the many dangers infecting the allegedly safe domestic and national borders. We shall finish early in the twentieth century with Conrad's Secret Agent, which sees the metropolis infected and shattered by disquieting anarchical and terroristic plots.