The study of Victorian Literature in the School of English offers an exceptional combination of internationally-renowned staff expertise and the resources of a major Victorian city, with historic libraries, civic buildings, art gallery, theatres, and arcades. As the regional centre of West Yorkshire, Leeds has important associations with literature of the period, most notably through its proximity to Haworth, the home of the Brontës. The University's Brotherton Library holds major archive collections on Victorian writers, including the Brontës, Gaskell, Hardy, James, Swinburne, and Thackeray.

The School offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the Victorian field, and, in addition, has a popular and long-established MA in Victorian Literature, one of the leading programmes of its kind in the UK. All postgraduate students (both MA and PhD) are encouraged to attend the Victorian Research Seminar, which in recent years has featured talks by prominent Victorianists from other universities, including Matthew Campbell, Holly Furneaux, and Helen Small (among many others). There is also a more informal Nineteenth-Century Reading Group led by students. The School has consistently maintained a strong cohort of doctoral students specializing in Victorian topics, many of whom have gone on to achieve notable success in publishing articles and books and being appointed to academic posts (in universities at Belfast, Exeter, Leicester, and York, as well as in countries including Israel, Japan, and the US). Student projects have received external funding for archive research at other libraries and conference participation, and currently include a White Rose Studentship for a thesis on internationalism in the Victorian city. Academic staff and postgraduates have organized international conferences and colloquia within the School, including Where next in Victorian literary studies? (2006), The Victorians and the Arab World (2007), and Thackeray in Time (2011). PhD students from the School of English have also regularly contributed to conferences organized by the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies (at Leeds Trinity University College). 

 

Research Interests

The Victorian Research Group in the School of English has strengths in a wide range of authors, genres, cultural contexts and intellectual debates across the period, and is able to supervise doctoral research on virtually any topic within the field. Currently, members of the group have particular research interests and expertise in the following areas of study (though prospective PhD applicants should not feel restricted by these):

Aestheticism and decadence
Authorship
Death and posthumous life
Gender and sexuality (projects include matriarchy and working girls)
Henry James
Ireland
John Ruskin
Literature and science (especially anthropology)  
Periodicals and print culture
Robert Louis Stevenson
Textual editing
Travel writing
The Victorian novel (especially late-Victorian romance and the Bildungsroman)
Victorian poetry
Visual culture
For further details of research interests, click on the individual web-pages of the following group members: Professor Michael Brennan, Dr. Denis Flannery, Dr Katy Mullin, Professor Francis O'Gorman, Dr Julia Reid, and Dr Richard Salmon

 

Undergraduate Study

At undergraduate level the School offers a core module, Victorian Literature (Level 3), plus a selection of more specialized option modules. Currently the following options are being offered: Aesthetic Movements of the Nineteenth Century, Fictions of Fallen Women, Forming Victorian Fiction, Literature of the 1890s, Sensation Novels of the 1860s, and Thomas Hardy's World

 

Postgraduate Study

The MA in Victorian Literature is comprised of a compulsory team-taught core module - Reading Victorian Literature: History, Text, and Context - and a selection of three option modules from the following: All that Wings Enfold: Henry James's Wings of the Dove, Apprentices to Life: The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth Century Fiction, The Brontës, and Imperial Masculinities: Late-Victorian Romance Fiction. In addition, students write a long dissertation on a Victorian topic of their choice under staff supervision. The MA provides a strong foundation for students who wish to go on to pursue research in this area at PhD level. Applications for PhD and MPhil study are welcome in all areas of Victorian literature.