Tutor information
Sara Zadrozny
Sara is a departmental tutor at the Department for Continuing Education and has taught for over twelve years. Sara has published articles addressing the Gothic, gender and temporality in Victorian Literature and is currently writing a monograph on female ageing in mid-Victorian fiction, medicine and society. Sara is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Courses
This course will focus on works by four of the era's major figures - Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy - identifying how the century's main preoccupations find substance in the work of its greatest writers.
The Victorian author Thomas Hardy was sensitive to the patterns of the past and to the tragic inevitabilities of human nature. By studying his poetry and prose, this course examines Hardy’s philosophy and belief in the roles of men and women.
Charles Dickens’s autobiographical novels David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861) reflect elements of the author’s childhood, upward mobility and romantic hopes. Compare Dickens’s changing recollections & reformulations of his fictive past.
Troubled by a range of concerns, fin-de-siècle novelists wrote about moral decay, degeneration and narcotised escapism. This course examines the physical embodiment of these fears in the form of vampires, New Women and debauched aesthetes.
The figure of the Victorian detective remains hugely popular in literature and media. This course will examine why, looking at the rationality, reliability and remoteness of this intriguing character by exploring three classic Victorian detective novels.