(in Polish) The Nineteenth-Century British Novel 1500-SDN-SP-LIT-TNCB

This course offers an advanced analytical exploration of a selected nineteenth century British novel, with particular attention to narrative form, genre conventions, and the intellectual and cultural debates of the Victorian period. Through close reading and critical discussion, participants will examine key aspects of novelistic technique — including narration, focalization, characterization, plot structure, and recurring themes — while engaging with relevant theoretical and historical frameworks. Particular emphasis will be placed on the novel’s original historical context and the social and cultural debates to which it belongs. The course aims to develop interpretative skills, strengthen methodological awareness, and foster independent work with both primary and secondary sources. This semester, the course is dedicated to Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel, Great Expectations (serialised 1860–61; book edition 1861).
The novel will be examined in depth within its literary, historical, and cultural contexts.
Literary context
– genre (Bildungsroman; the sentimental and Gothic traditions; the picaresque novel; social satire; sensation fiction)
– narrative technique and focalization
– language, style, imagery, and symbolism
– intertextual references (e.g., Frankenstein, Hamlet, Paradise Lost)
– the novel’s two alternative endings – grotesque and tragi comic elements

Historical and cultural context

– the novel’s contemporary reception
– recurring themes (gentlemen and gentle men; industry and idleness; respectability and crime; social mobility)
– Victorian debates on the concept of the “gentleman,” on prisons, the justice system, and the criminal underworld
– a concise biography of Dickens
The course programme also incorporates the following contemporary documents, studied alongside the novel:
• Charles Dickens, “Hard Experiences in Boyhood,” in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74)
• Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, “Gentlemen,” Cornhill Magazine (March 1862)
• William Sewell, “Gentlemanly Manners,” Sermons to Boys at Radley School (1854–69)
• Samuel Smiles, “Character: The True Gentleman,” Self Help (1859)
• John Ruskin, “Of Vulgarity,” Modern Painters (1860)
• Charles Dickens, “Criminal Courts,” Sketches by Boz (1839)
• Charles Dickens, “A Visit to Newgate,” Sketches by Boz (1839)
• “The Autobiography of a Convict,” in Voices of Our Exiles (1854)
• John Binny, “Thieves and Swindlers,” in London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62)
• Thomas Beard, “A Dialogue Concerning Convicts,” All the Year Round (11 May 1861)