As a window into the gory crypt of the soul, Gothic literature invades our privacy and makes us squirm in light of what it discovers. And yet, there is something perversely attractive about this compulsion that licenses desires normally repressed or curbed, desires the existence of which we may not wish even to acknowledge. What compels De Monfort's murderous hate? What tragedy has broken Martha Ray? Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the albatross?Īt the heart of Gothic literature lies a mystery-one that often remains inexplicable one that harries, harasses, and haunts characters and one that drives them, often, to acts of horrible violence. We will analyse artworks in their historical context, which means against the backdrop of scientific, political, and philosophical works central to the Enlightenment.
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Thematically, we concentrate on how desire-visceral, unruly, conflicted-takes aesthetic form. It also puts an emphasis on works by a segment of the population not well represented in the texts typically associated with the Enlightenment: women.
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This module focuses on how those aspects of human experience resistant to rationalization and economization and calculation emerge in and through a range of artworks in the period after the Restoration (1660) and up to and including first-generation Romanticism (1789-1800). For in the effort to relegate all forms of unreason to the past, the period witnesses an intense compression of the appetites that generate something of a counter-enlightenment-something like reason's own shadow. While certainly a time of radical change and rigorous re-examination, this simplified picture obscures a more complicated reality. Juxtaposed against the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment would shine a new, penetrating light over all domains of concern. The Enlightenment has often been considered the age of reason, or a period in which thought overcomes earlier forms of superstition or mysticism and develops empirical, scientific modes of seeking out truth. Other phenomena disclose a more hopeful pattern: forms of cooperation, solidarity and action which take different forms in different societies and periods, but which all point towards a desire to ensure collective survival and understanding. Some of these have been disturbingly constant: for example, the blaming and persecution of out-groups (Jews during the Black Death, gays and African minorities during the AIDS epidemic) or the use of the crises to engineer restructurings and policies desired by the powerful. Throughout, you are required to explore how pandemics are an unforgiving searchlight into the nature of the societies that they strike, exposing weaknesses and strengths, the nature of divisions, as well as manifold political, economic, social and cultural phenomena. The module implicitly considers the COVID pandemic through which we are living and places it within the framework developed by the module.
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It focuses upon six great pandemics – bubonic plague (the so-called 'Black Death'), small pox, cholera, the Great Flu, HIV/Aids – exploring their histories, how they were responded to, and how they shaped the societies that fell victim to them. This module is an urgent response to a contemporary crisis: the COVID pandemic that has affected all of us. Multiculturalism in Britain has not gone uncontested, but it is made Britain what it is today. It highlights the diverse range of cultural experiences which make up the fabric of British history.įinally, it makes clear that understanding the history of multiculturalism also requires an understanding of its intersections with race, gender, and sexuality. This is a module that focuses on the agency and experience of the people in Multicultural Britain as much as on their interactions with power, while never downplaying the enormous impact of racism and xenophobia. It will also examine the history of Europeans in Britain throughout the twentieth century, from anxieties about Jewish immigration in the 1900s, to uncertain welcome afforded to refugees and migrant workers in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to contemporary debates about the EU and 'Brexit'. The module will examine how 'race' became a defining concept for understanding British society, how mass immigration transformed concept of Britishness, and how Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities had to fight in order to exercise their rights as British citizens. Yet traditional histories of Britain often ignore the fact that British society has been remade and its culture enriched by people from a wide variety of different cultures, communities and backgrounds. Britain is a diverse, multicultural society.