ENGLISH ROMANTICISM: LITERATURE AND POLITICS (1780-1830)

Course Information
TitleΑΓΓΛΙΚΟΣ ΡΟΜΑΝΤΙΣΜΟΣ: ΛΟΓΟΤΕΧΝΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ (1780-1830) / ENGLISH ROMANTICISM: LITERATURE AND POLITICS (1780-1830)
CodeΛογ6-375
FacultyPhilosophy
SchoolEnglish Language and Literature
Cycle / Level1st / Undergraduate
Teaching PeriodWinter/Spring
CommonNo
StatusActive
Course ID600007253

Programme of Study: 2024-2025

Registered students: 0
OrientationAttendance TypeSemesterYearECTS
KORMOSElective CoursesWinter/Spring-6
Class Information
Academic Year2019 – 2020
Class PeriodSpring
Faculty Instructors
Weekly Hours3
Total Hours39
Class ID
600161650
Course Type 2021
Specific Foundation
Course Type 2016-2020
  • Scientific Area
Course Type 2011-2015
Knowledge Deepening / Consolidation
Mode of Delivery
  • Face to face
Digital Course Content
Erasmus
The course is also offered to exchange programme students.
Language of Instruction
  • English (Instruction, Examination)
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course students are expected: 1) to have acquired the ability to map and interpret the movement of English Romanticism and its socio-political dimension through the reading of selected literary and historical texts 2) to have acquired the ability to connect English Romanticism with the other Romantic movements in Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Greece) 3) to have become familiar with the broad cross-section of writers working in the years 1780-1830 4) to have broadened and deepened their critical and theoretical skills in reading and understanding complex texts 5) to have practiced their oral skills and academic writing
General Competences
  • Apply knowledge in practice
  • Retrieve, analyse and synthesise data and information, with the use of necessary technologies
  • Adapt to new situations
  • Make decisions
  • Work autonomously
  • Work in teams
  • Work in an interdisciplinary team
  • Generate new research ideas
  • Appreciate diversity and multiculturality
  • Demonstrate social, professional and ethical commitment and sensitivity to gender issues
  • Be critical and self-critical
  • Advance free, creative and causative thinking
Course Content (Syllabus)
THE COURSE PROVIDES STUDENTS WITH AN ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO THE SCHOLARLY AND CRITICAL STUDY OF POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS WRITTEN IN THE BRITISH ROMANTIC ERA (1780-1832). INFORMED BY RECENT SCHOLARSHIP IN ROMANTIC STUDIES, OUR READING OF SELECTED TEXTS WILL ATTEND CLOSELY TO THE HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, SOCIAL,AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS IN WHICH THE LITERATURE IS EMBEDDED. SPECIFICALLY, WE WILL CONCENTRATE ON THE THEMES OF NATURE, REVOLUTION, GENDER, EMPIRE, EXOTICISM, IDENTITY, AUTHORSHIP AND GENRE. ALONG WITH THE POETRY AND PROSE WE WILL READ CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL TEXTS THAT ADDRESS THESE AREAS. THE WRITERS TO BE STUDIED WILL INCLUDE BLAKE, BARBAULD,BYRON, BURKE, COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, HEMANS, WORDSWORTH AND KEATS. COURSE SYLLABUS i) Romanticism and Transcendence / Perceptions of Nature / Language and the New Poetic / Imagination Percy Bysshe Shelley,“Mont Blanc” (1075-79 & Journal-Letter 1073-74); “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1071-1073) William Wordsworth,“Intimations of Immortality” (538-542) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (601-605) ii) Romanticism and Revolution The Revolution Controversy and the “Spirit of the Age”: Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft. Norton, 148-167. William Godwin, from Political Justice (153-154) William Wordsworth, Books 10 and 11 of The Prelude. Norton, 371-378. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce (38-41) John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1397-1400) Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1091-1149) iii) Romanticism and Gender Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “On a Lady’s Writing” (corpus) Mary Robinson, “A London Summer Morning” (cf. Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” [534‒35]) William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (217-223) Keats, Lamia (1403-1419) iv) Romanticism and Empire George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour (corpus) Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor (1053-1071) v) Romanticism and Identity George Gordon, Lord Byron, from Don Juan, Dedication and Canto I (933-987) William Wordsworth, The Prelude I, (VI, XI). Norton 322-338. Felicia Hemans, from Records of Woman (1249-1306)
Keywords
Romanticism, politics, Romantic poetry, nature, revolution, empire
Educational Material Types
  • Notes
  • Video lectures
  • Audio
  • Multimedia
  • Book
Use of Information and Communication Technologies
Use of ICT
  • Use of ICT in Course Teaching
  • Use of ICT in Communication with Students
Description
Use of multimedia, power point presentations, exploration of various online databases and digital projects: Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu The William Blake archive: http://blakearhive.org Voice of the Shuttle: http://vos.ucsb.edu (general humanities site) “The English Romantic Page”: http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2750 International Byron Society: http://www.internationalbyronsociety.org (Byron’s life and works) British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832: http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/
Course Organization
ActivitiesWorkloadECTSIndividualTeamworkErasmus
Lectures117✓✓
Reading Assigment10✓✓✓
Written assigments20✓✓
Exams3
Total150
Student Assessment
Description
Assessment is based on an brief critical essay with limited bibliography (30% of the final grade) and on a final examination with a combination of two short essay questions on taught materials (70% of the final grade). The essay is assessed on the basis of organisation, argumentation, quality of expression in English and skills of analysis and synthesis in interpreting the movement of English Romanticism and its social-political dimension. The final examination is assessed on the basis of factual knowledge and familiarity with the required readings, in addition to the above criteria. Depending on student numbers each semester, the writing of the essay can be compulsory or optional. There are also optional oral presentations. Students are responsible for a fifteen-minute presentation so as to initiate discussion (e.g. introduce the class to a poet and to the historical context of his/her work, discuss an aspect of a poem, analyse a critical source etc. Students will also have to produce a handout to facilitate class discussion). Prior consultation with the instructor is necessary. Successful completion of this task will result in an extra mark on the students’ overall grade. The criteria are made known to the students at the beginning of the course.
Student Assessment methods
  • Written Exam with Short Answer Questions (Formative, Summative)
  • Written Exam with Extended Answer Questions (Formative, Summative)
  • Written Assignment (Formative, Summative)
  • Performance / Staging (Formative, Summative)
Bibliography
Course Bibliography (Eudoxus)
-Wasserman, Earl R. “Power and the Cycle of Mutability: Mont Blanc,” “Intellectual Beauty and the Self: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. -Trilling, Lionel. “The Immortality Ode.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. -Scrivener, Michael. “Literature and Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. -Dawson, P.M.S. “Poetry in an Age of Revolution.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. -Duff, David. “From Revolution to Romanticism: The Historical Context to 1800.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. -Vendler, Helen. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Odes of Keats. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. -O’Neill, Michael. “Prometheus Unbound.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. -Mellor, Anne. “Introduction: Romanticism, Gender and Genre.” Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. -Cox, Jeffrey N. “Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes.” The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. -Mellor, Anne. “Keats and the Complexities of Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. -Extract from David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). The Romantic Poets. Ed. Uttara Natarajan. MA: Blackwell, 2007. -Fulford, Tim, and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. pp. 1-47. -Butler, Marilyn. “The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour.” Byron and the Limits of Fiction. Ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1988. -Wasserman, Earl R. “The Poetry of Skepticism: Alastor” Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. -Roberts, Adam. “Records of Woman.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. -Benedict, Barbara M. “Readers, Writers, Reviewers, and the Professionalization of Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.
Additional bibliography for study
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: OUP, 1953. Armstrong, Isobel. “The Gush of the Feminine.” Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. Ed. Paula Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995. Behrendt, Stephen C. Reading William Blake. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992. Bone, Drummond, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Byron. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. Bygrave, Stephen, ed. Romantic Writings. London: Routledge in association with the Open University Press, 1996. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. James Boulton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Chandler, James, and Maureen N. McLane, eds. The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry 1780‒1830. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Curran, Stuart, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Duffy, Cian. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Eaves, Morris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Everest, Kelvin. English Romantic Poetry: An Introduction to the Historical Context and the Literary Scene. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Franklin, Caroline. Byron. London: Routledge, 2007. Fulford, Tim and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Gill, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Janowitz, Anne. Women Romantic Poets: Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. McCalman, Iain et al. eds. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. [Reference guide] Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. ---, ed. Romanticism and Feminism. Indiana University Press, 1988. ---. Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England. Indiana Univ. Press, 2000. Natarajan, Uttara, ed. The Romantic Poets: A Guide to Criticism. MA: Blackwell, 2007. O’Neill, Michael. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1989. Roe, Nicholas. The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Ross, Marlon. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Ruston, Sharon. Romanticism. London: Continuum, 2007. Stabler, Jane. Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Stauffer, Andrew M. Anger, Revolution and Romanticism. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Watson, J.R. English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1992. Wolfson, Susan J. The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.
Last Update
05-11-2021