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EN944 Sexual Geographies: Gender and Place in British Fiction, 1840-1940

The module details have now been updated for the 2014-2015 academic year.

****Please note the changes below to weeks 4 and 5. ****

Spring Term: Wednesday 10.00 - 12.00

Tutor: Gemma Goodman

In weeks 2 and 4 the seminars will be lead by Charlotte Mathieson

This module explores new ways of reading some of the most significant novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers an interdisciplinary approach to the representation of gender and place in literary texts, drawing particularly on the work of feminist geographers and philosophers, and cultural historians. The module will investigate the relationship between gender, place and nationhood, paying particular attention to the following: the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’; the depiction of domestic spaces and cultural iconography; the relationship between nation, empire and the formation of gendered subjectivity; the gendering of landscape; modernity, women and the city; gender and rural spaces; urban and rural wandering; spectatorship and surveillance.

Indicative Set Texts

1. Introduction: Theorising Gender and Space 1
Handouts will be made available

2. Gendering the Nation
Charlotte Bronté, Villette (1853)

3. Theorising Gender and Space 2
Handouts will be made available

4. Urban Wanderings
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855)

5. Wandering Women
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1880)

6. Empire Boys
H. Rider Haggard, She (1886)

7. The House in History
E.M.Forster, Howards End (1910)

8. Moving through Modernity
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

9. Longing and Belonging
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934)

10. Peripheral Spaces
Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (1936)


 

Illustrative Secondary Reading (see also the further reading page):

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983)

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969)

Alison Blunt and Gilliam Rose, eds, Writing Woman and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (Guildford Press, 1994)

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1994)

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader (Blackwell, 2000)

Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (HarperCollins Academic, 1992)

Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds Geographies of Modernism  (Routledge, 2005)

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993)

Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton University Press, 1998)

Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Cornell University Press, 1995)

Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester University Press, 2003)

Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson, eds. Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 (Pickering and Chatto, 2014)

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (Columbia University Press, 1991)

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race Femininity and Representation (Routledge, 1996)

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (Routledge, 1995)

Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Polity Press, 1999)

Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1996)

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2003)

Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (Sage, 2001)

Crane Lady

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dore New Zealander

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tissot HMS Calcutta