ENGLISH 335(092):

Literature of the Romantic Period

Steven Jones

MWF, 12:30-1:20

DH 441

     

NOTE: STARTING FRIDAY, AUG.30, THIS CLASS WILL MEET IN DAMEN HALL 441

This course is an interested, selective survey of poetry and prose of the British Romantic period (roughly 1789-1832), a time of rapid, often violent political and cultural change and reaction to that change. Assignments include 2 essays and an integrated online project (see below). Books: Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell), Frankenstein (Broadview edn.), and Ivanhoe (Penguin edn.)

 
week of:
Aug. 26

Introduction; Cowper, The Task: "On Slavery,""Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce"; Barbauld, "Epistle to William Wilberforce"; Romantic Circles edition of Obi

 

  
Sept. 2

(no class Monday 9/2); Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France; Paine, from Rights of Man; Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; Williams, from Letters Written in France; Mackintosh, Popular Excesses Which attended the Revolution

 

  
Sept. 9

Blake, Songs of Innocence & of Experience, The First Book of Urizen; cf. The Blake Archive

 

  
Sept. 16

Burns; Scott, Caledonia, Lochnivar; Moore, from Irish Melodies; Coleridge, "Fears in Solitude"; Clare, "The Badger,""O could I be as I have been"

 

  
Sept. 23

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

 

  
Sept. 30

William Wordsworth, from The Prelude, "I wandered lonely as a cloud"; Dorothy Wordsworth

 

  
Oct. 7 Coleridge,"The Eolian Harp,""Christabel,""Kubla Khan"; Bürger, Lenora

 

  
Oct. 14

(no class Monday 10/14); Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein

 

  
Oct. 21

Shelley, "To Wordsworth,""Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,""Mont Blanc"; Byron, "Prometheus,""Darkness"

 

  
Oct. 28

Shelley, "Ozymandias,""England in 1819," Mask of Anarchy, "Ode to the West Wind," from Prometheus Unbound

 

  
Nov. 4

Byron, "She Walks in Beauty,""On this Day I Complete my Thrty-Sixth Year," Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III, from Don Juan

 

  
Nov. 11

Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,""Eve of St. Agnes,""La Bell Dame Sans Merci,""Ode to a Nightingale,""Ode on a Grecian Urn,""Ode on Melancholy,""To Autumn"

 

  
Nov. 18

Scott, Ivanhoe

 

  
Nov. 25 (no class Friday 11/29); Hunt, "To Percy Shelley,""To the Same,""To John Keats"; Hemans, "The Grave of a Poetess,""Casabianca,""Nature's Farewell"; Landon

 

  
Dec. 2

(final meeting) Laura Mandell, "Hemans and the Giftbook Aesthetic" ; The Bijou

 

  

 

 

ASSIGNMENTS

1. 3-page essay explicating 1-3 problematic relationships between word and image in one plate from one of Blake's Songs (use Blake Archive image.) DUE 9/9 (20%).

2. 3-page essay arguing that Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" is a gothic poem. DUE 10/7 (20%).

3. a room or suite of rooms in the Romantic Circles MOO: Create an object-annotated edition, a virtual-reality space that interprets a scene in Ivanhoe in your own way. DUE ONLINE 11/27 (40%).


(No technology excuses accepted: I'm available for tutorials and helpdesk duty.)

4. FINAL EXAM (20%).