From Christopher Marlowe’s claim that his ‘rude pen/ Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men’, to Ted Hughes’s description of his marriage as ‘only a story./ Your story. My story’, love and the authoring of love have been of vital importance in the formation of identity and gender in western culture, yet discourses of love and desire consistently efface their social construction. Although always contradictory, the paradoxes of love have not always been the same throughout time. This cross-period module offers an in-depth study of the fate of some of literature’s notable tragic lovers in poetry, the novel and drama to think about the importance of such narratives in testing the political, social, and cultural temperature of different periods. In studying these texts we will be examining the evolution of ideas of love, fate, family, physical/spiritual eroticism, morality and tragedy across different ages and in different forms.

Some medieval writers conceived of passionate love as a profoundly destructive force: the adulterous stories of Tristan and Iseult, and Lancelot and Guinevere are powerful myths that sought to contain the surges of the destructive instinct in literary texts voyeuristically received. Early Modern writers, meanwhile, foregrounded the personal desires of their protagonists in a variety of new ways, yet persistently returned to the notion that love’s resolution could only be found in death. For many Victorians, writers’ private love-lives reflected the nation’s public ethical and economic health. Discourses of love became central to modern western society’s privileging of the private life and the pursuit of personal happiness that became so important to the 20^th century. In the twentieth century, too, discourses of love remained diverse and paradoxical.

Reading the texts from these periods alongside a variety of contextual and theoretical methodologies, the module explores the ways in which different writers, periods and forms have configured love as a location of norms, proprieties and taxonomies – and how these limits and constraints have been challenged. The module will explore these intertwined texts, contexts and ideas through close attention to the formal elements of the texts alongside situating them in their changing historical and theoretical circumstances from the medieval to the modern.

On completion of this module, students should be able to analyse the ways in which desire has been inscribed across a range of texts, cultural practices and social formations. They should be able to undertake close readings of the set texts and to think about different periods and different forms both contextually and intertextually.

Two one-hour lectures, and one one-hour seminar weekly. During the lectures students will be given handouts, and PowerPoint presentations will be used where appropriate. These will be made available to students on Learning Central directly after the session. During the seminars students may occasionally be asked to give presentations, and each week there will be the opportunity for small-group discussion and close-analysis of the text.

This module will develop specific skills. Students will become familiar with the techniques and tools of close-reading and textual analysis, as students develop and enhance their ability to assimilate knowledge of a variety of tropes, themes and formal techniques. The close analysis of texts will call for sensitivity to the use of language, as well as literary and historical awareness. Critical thinking, interdisciplinary skills, the successful integration of theoretical material into an analysis of a text, and the formulation of concise and effective argumentation will all be vital critical tools utilised during this module.  Employability skills include the ability to synthesise information, operating in group-based discussion, debating ideas and producing informed arguments in a clear, precise and professional manner.

Two essays of 1600 words. Questions will be provided but students will also be encouraged to develop their own topics. The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide; there are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

Type of assessment

% 

Title

Word length (essay)

Approx. date of assessment

Essay

50

 1600

November

Essay

50

 1600

January

THE POTENTIAL FOR REASSESSMENT IN THIS MODULE:

In common with University regulations, students are allowed two attempts at retrieval of any failed essay, for a maximum module mark of 40%.  Resit assessments are held over the summer.

Week 1

Introduction:            

1. Desire, Loss and the Fall                                                       
2. Orpheus and Eurydice: Ovid’s Metamorphoses (X.1-81; XI.1-66)*               RG

Weeks 2&3

Love, Desire and Loss in Medieval Literature

1. Beroul’s Romance of Tristan*                                                                         RG
2. Romance of Tristan and Sir Orfeo*                           

Weeks 4&5

Dying for love

4. Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare                                                                       MC

5.  Romeo and Juliet with selected Shakespeare sonnets*

Week 6 Reading Week

Weeks 7&8

The Victorians: tragic love, violent sexuality and repression

1. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights                                                                   
2. Foucault ‘We “Other Victorians”’*, Mathew Sweet’s ‘Introduction’

to Inventing the Victorians* and contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights*

Weeks 9&10

Reinterpreting the myths of love in the 20^th and 21^st Century

1. Ovid’s Myth of Iphis : Ali Smith Girl Meets Boy                                             BM
2. Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice: selected poems from

Plath’s Ariel* and Hughes’s Birthday Letters*                                               CSm

Week 11

Conclusion                                                                                                                All in

General

Belsey, Catherine, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994)

Blanshard, Alastair, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

de Rougemont, Denis, Love in the Western World (New York: Schocken Books, 1990)

Halwani, Raja, Philosophy of love, sex, and marriage: an introduction (London: Routledge, 2010)

Miles, Geoffrey, Classical Mythology in English Literature: a Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1999)

Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns ((Cambridge, Mass., London, Harvard University Press, 1992)

Radway, Janice A., Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (The University of North Carolina Press, 1991 2^nd ed.)

Soble, Alan, The Philosophy of Sex and Love (New York: Paragon House, 2008, 2nd ed.)

Weeks 2 & 3

Belsey, Catherine, The Future of Criticism (Blackwell: 2010)

de Rougemont, Denis, Love in the Western World (New York: Schocken Books, 1990)

John B Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)

Kendall, Elliot, ‘Family, Familia, and the Uncanny in Sir Orfeo’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 35 (2013): 289-327. Available on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/studies_in_the_age_of_chaucer/v035/35.kendall.pdf

Knight, Stephen, ‘Celticity and Christianity in Medieval Romance’, in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (Brewer, 2010) – note Knight’s essay does not deal with Sir Orfeo in any detail, but it is a useful way of interpreting Sir Orfeo in a wider context of Welsh-English Christian literary exchanges.

Lerer, Seth, ‘Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo’, Speculum, 60.1 (January 1985): 92-109. Available online via Librarysearch (select ‘Articles and more’)

Longsworth, Robert M., ‘"Sir Orfeo", the Minstrel, and the Minstrel's Art’, Studies in Philology, 79.1 (Winter, 1982): 1-11. Available on JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174104

Riddy, Felicity, ‘The Uses of the Past in “Sir Orfeo”’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 6 (1976): 5-15. Available on JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/3506383

Week 4 & 5

de Grazia, Margreta and Stanley Wells, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001).

Maguire, Laurie E., Studying Shakespeare: A Guide to the Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)

Orgel, Stephen and Sean Keilen, eds. Shakespeare and Gender. (Garland, 1999).

Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Oxford UP, 2005.

Ryan, Kiernan, Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001) 3rd edition

Week 7 & 8

Blake, Andrew. Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

Botting, Fred. Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996)

Boyd, Kelly and Rohan McWilliam (eds). The Victorian Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).

David, Deirdre (ed.). The Cambridge Guide to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Glen, Heather, The Cambridge Companion to The Brontës (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Sweet, Matthew, Inventing the Victorians, (London: Faber, 2010)

Week 9 & 10

Bundtzen, Lynda K. ‘Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes as Orpheus in Birthday Letters.’ Journal of Modern Literature 23.3-4 (2000): 455-69.

Clark, Heather, The Grief of Influence: Plath and Hughes (2011)

Gifford, Terry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).

Gill, Jo, ed. Modern Confessional Writing (2009)

-------- ‘“Exaggerated American”: Ted Hughes Birthday Letters’. Journal of Transatlantic Studies 2.2 (2004): 163-184.

Helle, Anita, ed. The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (2007)

Kendall, Tim, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001)

Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Plath and Hughes–A Marriage. (London: Viking, 2003).

------------------ ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Call and Response’. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Ed. Jo Gill. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). 156-71.

Miles, Geoffrey, Classical Mythology in English Literature: a Critical Anthology (London Routledge, 1999)

Mitchell, Kaye, 'Queer Metamorphoses: Girl meets boy and the Futures of Queer Fiction', in Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Monica Germana, ‎Emily Horton (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Wagner, Erica. Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters. (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

Young, Tori, 'Love and the Imagination are not gendered things: an interview with Ali Smith', Contemporary Women's Writing, 9.1 (2015), pp, 131-48