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Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. By Donald Gray. New York: Norton, 2001.
Shelley, Mary. Ed. By J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996.
Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd Edition. Ed. By Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
This semester we will read and discuss poems and novels written by some of the best English writers from a period which has so greatly influenced contemporary notions about art and its relation to individual perception, memory and vision.
We will study the writers who created a literary revolution during the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the 19th, including Robert Burns, a "pre Romantic," who wrote poems dealing with working class Scots, and who influenced the Romantics in a number of ways. We will begin by looking at Romantic ideas about poetry and the poet and we will look at the fervor caused in England by the French Revolution. Then we will look at Pride and Prejudice, a novel by one of the great novelists of the century, Jane Austen. Few, if any, literary historians would classify Austen as a Romantic; she happens to be one of those brilliant figures who resist classification. She did, however, begin her writing career around the same time as those key figures of British Romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Her novels open a window on the lives of the British landed gentry, especially in terms of marriage, property and the circumscribed lives available to women. Since writers like Burns, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge insisted on expanding the subject matter of serious literature to include people of the working class, Austen provides an interesting contrast. While she has no interest in depicting the lower classes, she has great insight into the world women must inhabit.
By contrast we will look at William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” whose symbolic poetry is very different from Austen’s socially grounded work, and who includes the plight of lower class characters in his work. Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” will lead us into a consideration of another major socio-historical movement, the England’s involvement with the transatlantic slave trade and the abolition movement that began in the 18th Century and culminated with the end of the slave trade in England in 1834. For this unit we will look at poems by work by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More and Ann Yearsly that respond to slavery and the slave trade. We will watch the feature film “Amazing Grace,” (title of the famous hymn was written by John Newton, a former slave ship captain) which focuses on abolitionist politician William Wilberforce.
Following our study of the slave trade and abolition movement, we will look at the great tradition of the descriptive-meditative poem begun by Coleridge and developed by Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, and at how Coleridge and Keats used the supernatural in their work. Another major course theme will be the Romantic Rebel. We will study that figure as it occurs in writers like Blake, Byron and both Percy and Mary Shelley. Finally, we will look at Keats' odes as they struggle to connect aesthetic intensity with life experience.
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will learn
1.
What makes the
Romantic Period in
2. About the effect of historical events like the French Revolution and the Abolition movement on Romanticism through reading, PowerPoint presentations, which will provide a visual dimension to student learning, and class discussions.
3. To do close readings of particular poems, novels and non-fiction writings through frequent class discussions.
4. To enter the discourse community of the English profession, learning to write literary analysis for an interested audience.
5.
To write carefully reasoned, well-organized essays
analyzing particular texts in a series of paper and/or in-class writings.
Interesting Web Sites for British Romantic Writers:
Romantic Praxis-- Critical Essays published online on topics in Romanticism.
Jane Austen Information Page – Lots of information about Austen’s life, work and social and historical context. You might find the entries on education, marriage and the status of women particularly useful
The William Blake Archive- -A work in progress, this wonderful site includes text and color plates for ten of Blake's illuminated books, including The Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The First Book of Urizen. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake/illuminated-books/index.html
Course Work and Grading:
1. Class Participation – This is a graduate seminar, one which will emphasize discussion of texts and ideas. Regular, active participation is expected and will weigh heavily in my assessment.
2. Short Paper (3 – 5 pages) on Pride and Prejudice, due 9/16.
3. Poetry Analysis Paper (3 – 5 pages) on your choice of a poem from the period, due 10/21.
4. Seminar Paper Proposal (3 – 5 pages including bibliography) presented and due on 10/28.
5. Seminar Paper (20 pages including Works Cited) due 12/9. Students will present on 12/9 or 12/16 as determined by lot. Note that in the interest of fairness papers are due on 12/9 regardless of presentation date.
Calendar
Week 1 8/26: Romantic Aesthetics. Readings in Wu Anthology: Introduction, xxx – xlvii; Wordsworth: “Nutting,” 476, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802,” 534, (compare with Swift’s “A Description of the Morning” and Charlotte Smith’s “On being cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea” – handouts), “The World is Too Much With Us,” 534, from The Two Part Prelude – the boat, 450 – 451, the woman with the pitcher, 456, from The Thirteen Book Prelude, Crossing the Alps, 553 ff., The Climbing of Snowdon, 566 ff.; Robert Burns: “To a Mouse,” 268; Coleridge: “Kubla Khan,” 619 ff. (see also Mary Robinson’s “To the Poet Coleridge,” 254; Byron: “Prometheus,” 887.
Week 2 9/2:
Poetry continued. Readings in Wu Anthology: The French Revolution and the Pamphlet
Wars: Richard Price, from A Discourse on
the Love of our Country, 4 ff. Edmund Burke: from Reflections on the Revolution in France, 10 ff; Thomas Paine: from The Rights of Man, 24 ff.; Helen Maria
Williams: from Letters written in France
in the summer of 1790, 279 ff.
Robert Burns: songs (handouts and played in class), “To a Mouse,” 268; Tam o’Shanter, 270 ff.
Week 3 9/9: Reading: Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Week 4 9/16: Pride and Prejudice continued -- paper due; Reading in Wu Anthology: Blake, “The Songs of Innocence and Experience,” 179 ff.
Week 5 9/23: Blake Songs continued. Introduction to The Slave Trade and Abolition. Reading in Wu Anthology: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, 38; Hannah More, “Slavery: A Poem, 66; Ann Yearsley, “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade,” 158.
Week 6 9/30: Film: Amazing Grace. Discussion of film.
Week 7 10/7: Reading in Wu Anthology: The Descriptive-Meditative Tradition. Reading in Wu Anthology: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” 35; Coleridge: “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” 613, ff.; “Frost at Midnight,” 625 ff.; Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” 407 ff. Slides of the Lake District.
Week 8 10/14: Readings in Wu Anthology: Shelley: “Mont Blanc,” 1075 ff. ; Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale”, 1395 ff; Wordsworth: “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 538 ff.; Coleridge: “Dejection: An Ode,” 673 ff.
Week 9 10/21: The Romantics and the Supernatural. Readings in Wu Anthology: Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fears,” 748; Mary Robinson, “The Haunted Beach,” 250 ff; Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere, 339 ff”., “Christabel, 639 ff;” Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” 1390 ff.”
Week 10 10/28: Poetry analysis paper due. The Romantic Rebel. Reading in Wu Anthology: Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 206 ff.
Week 11 11/4: Reading in Wu Anthology: Byron, Manfred, 896, ff.; Shelley lyrics: “To Wordsworth,” 1053,” “Ozymandias,” 1079, “Song: To the Men of England (handout), Prometheus Unbound, Act I, 1091 – 1118.
11/11 – Veteran’s Day: No Class
Week 12 11/18: Seminar Paper Proposals due and class presentations.
Week 13 11/25:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
Week 14 12/2: Frankenstein; Keats: Odes, 1393 – 1403 and “To Autumn,” 1419.
Week 15: 12/9 and Finals week 12/16: Seminar Paper
Presentations. Seminar papers due on or before 12/9 in class.