Course overview
The course will provide a grounding in the Victorian period, and an understanding of its politics of Empire, gender and sexuality, class and race, but it will also focus on theories of intertextuality and adaptation to explore the literary and cinematic afterlives of key nineteenth-century British novels by canonical authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Joseph Conrad. We will track Victorian tropes such as the self-made man, the orphan child, sexual propriety, female vengeance and the asylum narrative in adaptations of some seminal Victorian texts and investigate why they continue to have such purchase on the popular imagination.