No specific time (videocast); two non-mandatory Zoom meetings
In the last four or five decades, the historical novel has experienced a veritable renaissance, and it is still going strong, judging by the astounding success that Hilary Mantel scored with her three novels about the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell, two of which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012. I will begin my lecture with a discussion of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), the first historical novel, to point out the classical conventions of the genre as it was practised in the nineteenth century. Then I will take a leap to the late twentieth century and discuss such novels as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969),Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009). These recent works have been referred to as historiographic metafiction or metahistorical novels because they combine their reconstructions of the past with a critical reflection on the problems inherent in such reconstructions: Can we know the past at all? To what extent do our present concerns colour the stories that we tell about the past? Is it possible to distinguish a factual story, e.g. a biography, from a fictional story? Students should be aware that the lecture will not be given in a lecture hall but recorded and made available online. BA students may consider taking this lecture in connection with the seminar “History Plays in the Twentieth Century”.
Participants will have to read Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and excerpts from other texts.
Assessment/requirements: there will be a choice between a written and an oral exam.
Thursday 8-10
In this course, students will be able to exercise and improve their skills in the reading of fiction, concentrating on such standard aspects as plot, character, setting, time, point of view and narrator. The course will show that a sustained focus on each of these aspects allows a more profound and detailed understanding of a narrative text. We will study E. M. Forster’s short novel Where Angels Fear to Tread and a number of short stories.
Required texts: E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (Penguin, ISBN: 978-0141441450); other texts will be made available in the Moodle course.
Assessment/requirements: written exam.
Tuesday 16-18
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953). In this seminar, we will discuss three plays that are set in different foreign countries of this sort: Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom (1976) and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993). The remaining play or plays will be chosen at a later point. In our discussion of these plays, we will analyse how they reinterpret the historical record, which forms and techniques they use and what the exploration of the past means for the present in which they were first performed. Students might consider taking this course in connection with the lecture on (meta)historical novels.
Required texts: Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (Penguin Classics, ISBN: 978-0141921440); Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (Faber and Faber, ISBN: 978-0571169344 ). All other texts will be made available in the Moodle course.
Assessment/requirements:
Übung: a short paper.
Seminar: research paper.
Tuesday 10-12
Why we laugh and what precisely it is that we laugh at are questions that have occupied philosophers, rhetoricians, literary scholars and psychologists since the times of Plato and Aristotle. In this course, we will discuss some of the answers given to these questions and check their validity against comic texts and films. Theorists to be studied will include some of the classic names (Aristotle, Hobbes, Freud, Bergson), but we will also look at more recent contributions from psychology and gender studies.
Required texts will be made available in the Moodle course.
Assessment/requirements:
Übung: oral exam.
Seminar: research paper.
Thursday 10-12
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has had an enormous impact on English literature and culture. He forged a new poetic idiom, which may not quite be the “language really used by men” as he claimed, but which is still significantly different from the “poetic diction” of his 18th-century predecessors. Wordsworth also invented, along with other writers of his time, the way in which we think and feel about nature. In the seminar, we will work our way through a selection from Wordsworth’s poems to get a sense of his style, his themes and his ideas. In addition to this, we will also compare his poems with those by his 18th-century predecessors, his Romantic contemporaries, and by later poets in order to recognise his pivotal position in the history of English poetry and culture.
Required text: William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: OUP, 2008). A few additional texts will be made available in the Moodle course.
Assessment/requirements:
Übung: short paper.
Seminar: research paper.
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Last update: Aug 10, 2026