Victorian Masculinities

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Victoria Mills
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

Over the past 30 years, masculinity has become an important sub-field in Victorian studies. In this module we introduce you to a range of Victorian masculine ‘types’ from the mid- to late-nineteenth century (the aesthete, the dandy, the imperial adventurer, the decadent, the antiquary, the muscular Christian) as well as equipping you with the critical tools to analyse both fiction and forms of visual representation from a gender perspective.

We will consider the differences between normative and non-normative forms of masculinity: how are dominant and subversive constructions of masculinity represented in literature and art? What does it mean to queer a Victorian text or author? How does our understanding of masculinity change across the nineteenth century? What is the relationship between Victorian debates about masculinity and the ‘Woman Question’? How are notions of masculinity shaped by genre?

Using a range of canonical and non-canonical texts as well as Victorian painting and caricature, we will investigate the ways in which different styles of masculine identity were debated and contested across the nineteenth century and explore understandings of ‘the masculine’ in relation to issues of class and race. Was Victorian masculinity fundamentally an identity in perpetual crisis?

This module includes an optional visit to Tate Britain.

Indicative syllabus

• Theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to studying Victorian masculinity
• Victorian Keats: effeminacy, sensuality, transgression (extracts from Tennyson, Hopkins, Pater)
• Muscular Christianity
• Victorian bromance
• The idea of the gentleman
• Pre-Raphaelite masculinities
• Aestheticism and androgyny
• Decadence and desire
• Imperial masculinities
• Masculinity and antiquarianism

By the end of this module, you will:

• have explored the representation of masculinity in a wide range of nineteenth-century cultural production, including painting, poetry and the novel
• understand how the Victorians debated and contested different types of masculine identity and how this changed across the nineteenth century
• understand masculinity in the context of important Victorian debates about evolution, new technologies, politics, art, design and literature
• recognise and understand key critical and interdisciplinary approaches to studying Victorian masculinity, including queer theory and recent work on gender and performativity.