A Window Into Victorian Britain

While windows form the central theme of this seminar, they also serve as an effective framing device for exploring key aspects of Victorian British culture. Through this lens, various topics of Victorian cultural history can be explored, such as the railways, literary tourism, museums, galleries, and consumerism, considering also contributions by figures like Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in discussions of art and architecture. 

Windows also appear as a popular motif in Victorian literature. 

Therefore, brief references will be made also to novels, the works of which themselves operate as metaphorical windows into this cultural period (or as houses with many windows, as Henry James argued in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady). Using the window theme students will be encouraged to engage with various theoretical frameworks, such as liminality, gender, the Gothic, or spatial theory, fostering diverse approaches to perception, focalisation, and ways of seeing.