ENGLISH ROMANTICISM: LITERATURE AND POLITICS (1780-1830)

Specific Foundation

Knowledge Deepening / Consolidation

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

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

The course provides students with an advanced introduction to the scholarly and critical study of poetry and other writings produced 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, and cultural contexts in which the literature is embedded. Specifically, we will concentrate on the themes of nature, sublimity, revolution, gender, empire and genre. Along with the poetry and prose we will read contemporary theoretical texts and literary criticism that address these areas. The writers to be studied will include Blake, Barbauld, Byron, Burke, Coleridge, Hemans, Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. As our class this year coincides with the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, it will include a session on Romantic Philhellenism. COURSE OUTLINE / WORKING SCHEDULE Introduction & Wu, Duncan. “Introduction.” Romanticism: An Anthology. xxx-xlii. & Bainbridge, Simon. “The Historical Context.” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. OUP, 2008. i) Defences of Poetry / Romantic Theories of Art  William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802); “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”  Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry  John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” & from Letters [Negative Capability], [A Poet has no Identity] in Norton 9th, pp. 967-68, 972-73.  McKusick, James. “Nature.” A Companion to European Romanticism. Ed. Michael Ferber. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.  Ferber, Michael. “Tintern Abbey.” The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2012.  Ferber, Michael. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. ii) Revolution and Reaction  The Revolution Controversy and the “Spirit of the Age”: Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, James Gillray. (Norton 9th, pp. 183-207).  William Blake, “London.”  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”; “Ozymandias”  Dawson, P.M.S. “Poetry in an Age of Revolution.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: CUP, 1993.  Ferber, Michael. “Ode to the West Wind.” The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. iii) Gender  Mary Robinson, “London’s Summer Morning.”  Felicia Hemans, from Records of Woman: “Indian Woman’s Death Song.”  John Keats, Lamia.  Curran, Stuart. “Romantic Poetry: The I altered.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. A.K. Mellor, 1988. Rpt. in Romantic Writings, ed. Stephen Bygrave.  Mellor, Anne. “Keats and the Complexities of Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. iv) Empire; Orientalism  Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce.”  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan.”  George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour (PDF file on e-learning)  Richardson, Alan. “Slavery and Romantic Writing.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.  Leask, Nigel. “Easts.” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. OUP, 2005.  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. v) The English Romantics and the Greek War of Independence  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Hellas (PDF file on e-learning)  John Keats, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.”  George Gordon, Lord Byron, from Don Juan, Canto III, “The Isles of Greece” (PDF file on E-learning); “On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year.”  Webb, Timothy. “Romantic Hellenism.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: CUP, 1993.  Tyler, Tony. “Byron’s Greek Freedom in ‘The Isles of Greece’ Lyric.” The Byron Journal 31 (2003): 66-71.

Romanticism, politics, Romantic poetry, nature, revolution, empire, philhellenism

12-12-2021