If Yorkshire and the Lake District were much admired by Romantic poets, the industrial North of England has rarely been cherished by tourists. Yet the former textile centres like Manchester, likewise the coal-mining regions, have attracted numerous visitors: merchants, social critics, journalists, film-makers. This seminar will cover a variety of issues concerned with the industrial and post-industrial North from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Our material will include literary texts (Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and poems by Tony Harrison), journalism (George Orwell), paintings of the industrial landscape (such as L.S. Lowry's), excerpts from Robert Roberts's autobiography, which is set in the slums of Salford, Hanif Kureishi's reflections on multicultural Bradford and the by now canonical film The Full Monty (1997) about unemployed steel workers in post-industrial Sheffield. Besides, this seminar will introduce students to some theoretical key texts from the field of Cultural Studies. Master copies of the shorter texts will be made available before the beginning of the course. Please make sure that you have read Dickens's Hard Times BEFORE the first session and Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier until the second day of our seminar. Please buy and read the following: Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 2003). George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001). Further introductory reading: Russell, Dave, Looking North. Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Schließen