The English-speaking world is currently celebrating the life and works of Charles Dickens (1812-70) to mark the bicentenary of his birth. The great Victorian writer has created some of the most popular works in English literature and continues to inspire writers, filmmakers and artists throughout the world.
In this seminar we shall focus particularly on Dickens's connection with Australia. We will first read Dickens's Great Expectations (1860/61), in which a young boy's life is changed due to a chance encounter with an escaped convict, and study Victorian representations of Australia, including paintings and cartoons. We will then move on to postcolonial re-writings of the novel, including award winning Australian novelist Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997) and New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006), which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Texts
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (Faber and Faber)
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (John Murray)
A reader with further material will be available at Kopiersysteme Priebe (Segerothstr.) at the beginning of the semester.
Participants will prepare presentations on selected topics during the semester; master students are required to produce additional written course work. |
