London, United Kingdom

British Literature and the Birth of Mass Media: Victorian Periodical to Modernist Magazine

When we think of literature many of us picture books on a shelf. But this has never been the only way to encounter texts and ideas. New technologies and the evolution of mass media have profoundly influenced how people read and the way they think. This module teaches students how to critically engage with periodicals: newspapers, journals and magazines which were one of the first forms of mass media that aimed at expanding readerships and shaping them. How did literature engage with periodicals and how did periodicals use literature? We will seek to answer this question by engaging with texts in the form they were originally published – from the seventeenth century to the present. Students will be taught the intellectual and practical tools needed to handle and interpret periodicals through seminars, workshops and other online activities and they will engage with remarkable works of literature in new and unfamiliar contexts.

Course leader

Dr Alex Grafen

Target group

This is a level one module (equivalent to first year undergraduate). No prior subject knowledge is required to study this module but students are expected to have a keen interest in the subject area. Students must have completed at least one year of undergraduate study by the start of the module in order to enroll.

Course aim

Upon successful completion of this module, students will:

Understand the importance of the periodical form and be able to handle digital periodical collections.
Have a working knowledge of the history of periodical publishing from the seventeenth through to the twenty-first century.
Have looked in detail at canonical texts by Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in their original periodical contexts.
Have acquired the skills to carry out individual research into periodical cultures
Be familiar with some of the major trends in modern scholarship on periodical literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Credits info

7.5 EC
7.5 ECTS / 4 US / 15 UCL

Fee info

GBP 2165: Students who study for 6 weeks (2 modules) will receive a tuition fee discount.