English 746: Introduction to Graduate Study in Literature of the Romantic Period
Spring Quarter, 2003
Marlene Longenecker
Denney 245, TR 11:30-1:30
Office: Denney 405
292-6114 (voice mail)
Course Description
My approach to this course is to explore Romanticism as a cluster of responses—philosophical, aesthetic, ideological, formal, and thematic—to the promise and the (devastating) failure of the French Revolution. The “cluster” includes things like: the critique of enlightenment/neoclassical aesthetics (organic form, the sublime, the gothic); the turn to “nature” as inspiration, consolation, and model for the Imagination (the most important word in the Romantic lexicon); the question of the role of poetry (and art generally) in the promotion of the new ethics of human rights (the demands of a “democratic” subject; the abolition of slavery; feminism); the new valorization of the “domestic”—both “home” and “England”—as a refuge from European violence and from the new (and still strange) capitalist economies; and the continuous “anxious” engagement with Milton in the attempt to write the modern (secular) epic of the self especially Wordsworth, Keats, Byron).
Texts
John Milton, Paradise Lost (ed. J. Leonard, Penguin: any edition of PL is fine, or any anthologized selection that includes the first three books of the poem)
Damrosch, et. al. eds, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries (second edition)
Duncan Wu, ed. A Companion to Romanticism (Blackwell)
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford World’s Classics)
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (ed. Pamela Woof, Oxford)
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (ed. William Richey and Daniel Robinson, Houghton Mifflin Riverside Edition)
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Mary/Maria/Mathilda (ed. Janet Todd, Penguin)
You will need to access your Web CT account for this course, and you will need Acrobat Reader to access the OnLine Electronic Reserves.
Requirements
1. Of course you will come to class every day prepared to engage in profound discussion of the most fascinating literature ever written. Silent students do not do well in my classes.
2. Beginning in Week III, each student will prepare three brief oral presentations, two on secondary sources and one on a primary text, over the course of the quarter (see the attached sign-up sheet). The secondary sources will be on reserve (online) so that everyone can read them, but the presenter has the primary responsibility of a) summarizing the argument carefully and b) presenting some sort of response to it in terms of its usefulness to you as a reader. Think of this as a sort of oral annotated bibliography. On the primary text, I want you to come to class prepared to lead off the discussion with your own interpretation/response to the text. These responses will be posted to the class on Web CT and I will grade them in both written and oral form. (DO NOT just read your written report to the class, which is obviously a waste of time.) Everybody is responsible for reading everybody else’s work and coming prepared to discuss it.
3. I will collect some current Calls for Papers on Romanticism for upcoming conferences, and you will write a conference paper (8-10 pp double spaced—20 minutes!) in response to one of them, which you will deliver to your classmates (and invited friends) and turn in to me in written form during finals week.
Reading Assignments
NOTE: Longman = the anthology; Companion = Duncan Wu’s anthology; OnLine = on reserve electronically at the library; WebCT = text or image on the website; Other titles are self-explanatory.
Tues 4/1 Introductions
Thurs 4/3 Milton and the Romantics
Milton: Paradise Lost, Books I-III
Companion: Trott (Ch 52)
Longman: Introduction
W. Wordsworth: “London, 1802,” “Preface to the Excursion”
Tues 4/8 Revolution and Abolition
Companion: Duff (Ch 3), Shaw (Ch 5), Bromwich (Ch 10), Richardson (Ch 46)
OnLine: Hazlitt, “The French Revolution”
Longman, from the section on “The Rights of Man and the Revolution
Controversy”: Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Williams
From the section on “The Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade”:
Prince, Clarkson
Percy Shelley, “England in 1819”
Thurs 4/10 The New Aesthetics: The Critique of Neoclassicism and the “Organic” Imagination
Companion: Perry (Ch 1), Perry (Ch 37), Jonathan Wordsworth (Ch 48)
WEB CT: excerpts from Wincklemann, Reynolds
Longman: Coleridge, Biographia Ch 13
Percy Shelley, Defence of Poetry
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
W. Wordsworth, “There Was a Boy”
Tues 4/15 The New Aesthetics: The Sublime, The Beautiful, and the Picturesque
OnLine Reserves: Burke from Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas Concerning the Beautiful and the Sublime
Kant, from Analytic of the Sublime
Web CT: Radcliffe, excerpt from The Mysteries of Udolpho
Companion: Trott (Ch 7)
Longman: Percy Shelley, “Mt. Blanc”
Thurs 4/17 Gothic and Romantic
Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance
Companion: Miall (Ch 34)
Reports (OnLine): Robert Miles, “The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic”
Diane Hoeveler: “Gothic Feminism and the
Professionalization of ‘Femininity’”
Tues 4/22 The Poetics of Revolution: Blake
Longman: Songs of Innocence and Experience
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Companion: Hilton (Ch 9)
Reports (OnLine): Heather Glen,
Heather Glen,
E.P. Thompson, “London”
Lauren Henry,
Thurs 4/24 The “Leveling Muse”: Democratic Poetics and the Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads: “Preface” (390 ff)
Read all the poems from the 1798 edition except “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tintern Abbey”
` Readings: “The Thorn”
“Simon Lee”
“Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”
Tues 4/29 Lyrical Ballads: Context and Response
Lyrical Ballads, from Part Two, Contexts:
“Literary and Philosophical Backgrounds” (119ff)
“Political Backgrounds” (167 ff)
“Rustic and Humanitarian Poetry” (272ff)
“Contemporary Reviews” (351ff)
Companion: MacEathron (Ch 13)
On-Line: Hazlitt, “Mr. Wordsworth”
Reports (OnLine): Michael Gamer TITLE
Susan Wolfson Title
Kenneth Johnston Title
Gary Harrison Title
Thurs 5/1 Domestic Poetics: The Wordsworths at Grasmere
D. Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal (1-137)
On Line: W. Wordsworth, from “Home at Grasmere” and “Letter to Fox”
Tim Fulford, re: “Home at Grasmere”
Longman: W. Wordsworth, “Michael,” “Resolution and
Independence,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”
Companion: Woof (Ch 14)
Reports (OnLine): Heintzelman on Grasmere
Beth Darlington on DW
Tues 5/6 Romanticism and Feminism
Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman
Reports (OnLine): Gary Kelley
Mary Poovey
Thurs 5/8 The “Other” Romanticism: Anna Barbauld
Longman: Read all the poetry by Barbauld and Croker’s Review of “1811”
Companion: Wolfson (Ch 38)
OnLine: Armstrong Title?
Readings: “Washing Day”
“Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”
Tues 5/13 The “New Sublime and the Poetry of “Place”
Longman: W. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
OnLine: Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head”
Reports (OnLine): Woodring
Roe
Wallace
Pascoe
Thurs 5/15 Reading the “Greater Romantic Lyric”
OnLine: Abrams, “Style and Structure in the Greater Romantic Lyric”
Longman: W. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (again), “Ode on Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Readings: “Intimations”
“Dejection”
“West Wind”
“Nightingale”
Tues 5/20 Epics of Selfhood I: Coleridge
Longman: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”
Companion: Perry (Ch 12)
Reports (OnLine): ???
Thurs 5/22 Epics of Selfhood II: Wordsworth
Longman: From The Prelude, the excerpts from Books I, II, IV, VI, X, XI, and
XIII
Companion: Jonathan Wordsworth (Ch 16)
Readings: Book I, The “Stolen Boat” scene (ll. 373-442)
Book IV, The Discharged Soldier (ll. 360-504)
Book VI, Crossing the Alps (ll. 488-572)
Book X, The Carousel Square in Paris (ll. 38-82)
Tues 5/27 Epics of Selfhood III: Keats
OnLine: “Hyperion”
Longman: “The Fall of Hyperion”
Read the two pieces by Lockhart on “The Cockney School of Poetry”
Reports (OnLine)
???
Thurs 5/29 Epics of Selfhood IV: Byron
Longman: Manfred and the Section on “Manfred and Its Time: The Byronic
Hero”
The excerpts from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Readings: Childe Harold, Canto III
Childe Harold, Canto IV
Tues 6/3 “Byronism” and the Female Hero
OnLine: Percy Shelley, The Cenci
Mary Shelley, “Mathilda”
Reports (OnLine):
Thurs 6/5 “Death is the Mother of Beauty”: Keats
Longman: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
“Ode on Melancholy”
“To Autumn”
OnLine: Bate, “Negative Capability”
Companion: Creaser (Ch 23)