‘All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world’ wrote Edmund Burke in 1790. The period that we now call Romantic was dominated by revolution and by responses to a series of revolutions occurring at home and abroad. This module will survey a broad range of genres, including poetry, philosophy, fiction, the essay, and drama, in order to investigate the vexed relationship between Romantic art and revolution. It will chart significant shifts occurring in the national and global politics of the period, as well as in literature, technology, science, and philosophical modes of thinking about human beings, their rights, and their impact on the nonhuman world around them.

The module will ask students to work closely with literary texts and will situate them in their historical context, but it will also encourage careful thinking about the continuities and discontinuities between the Romantic period and our own time. Romanticism is often considered as the beginning of modernity and Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads has similarly been seen as initiating a brave new world for modern art. But does this narrative oversimplify the connections between Romanticism and eighteenth-century aesthetics? And is it hard for us to assess the aesthetics and politics of the period from a vantage point that is arguably constructed by it? In addition to providing a good grounding in Romantic literature, this module will ask these and other serious questions about the relationship between history, politics and aesthetics in the period.

• Understand the content and closely analyse the form in a variety of different genres of Romantic writing (and, to a lesser extent, image)
• Demonstrate knowledge of the historical, political and aesthetic context of the period
• Engage with a wide-range of relevant secondary reading
• Pose theoretical questions about the nature of history and the role of art works in responding to and creating it

The module will be delivered through a one-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar per week. The lecture will provide historical context and a number of different thematic angles of entry into the primary texts. It will also paraphrase from and extract exemplary secondary readings. This will act as preparation for the seminar, which will use a range of stimulus materials in order to generate discussion: these might include the texts themselves, contemporary responses to them, images, and video. Students will also be encouraged to read poems aloud in the seminar and may be asked to give unassessed presentations.

WHAT IS EXPECTED OF ME?

Students are expected to attend and participate in the lectures and seminars for all modules on which they are enrolled. Students with good cause to be absent should inform their module leaders, who will provide the necessary support. Students with extenuating circumstances should submit the Extenuating Circumstances Form in accordance with the School’s procedures.

The total number of hours which students are expected to devote to each 20-credit module is 200. Of these, 30 hours will be contact hours with staff (lectures and seminars); the remaining 170 hours should be spent on self-directed learning for that module (reading, preparation for seminars, research, reflection, formative writing, assessed work, exam revision). There are also additional seminars and workshops that students are able to attend.

This module will develop skills in:

• Close literary analysis
• Synthesis of complex information
• Developing and making an argument
• Conceptual questioning
• Spoken communication, through group-work and presentations
• Written communication, through the assessed essay

This module is examined by means of a 30-minute group oral assessment presentation to be delivered during Sessions 6–10 (worth 30% of the module mark), and a 2,200-word essay during the end-of-semester examination period (70% of the module mark).

Topics for the group oral presentation will be given to you at the beginning of the semester. These are in the form of brief ‘prompts’/concepts. They cover material taught in weeks 1–5 (i.e. before Reading Week). You will not be able to write your essay on authors/topic covered in your presentation.

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. 

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR REASSESSMENT IN THIS MODULE:

In accordance 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.

1. The Romantic Avant-Garde?

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In seven parts’
William Wordsworth, ‘The Idiot Boy’
Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’ in A Companion to Romanticism ed. Duncan Wu
Duncan Wu, Introduction to Romanticism: An Anthology

2. Revolutionary Visions, Revolutionary Images: Blake

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience together with their illuminations (texts in Wu; images accessible at http://www.blakearchive.org/)

3. Women and the Discourse of Slavery

Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’, ‘The Rights of Woman’
Hannah More,  ‘Slavery: A Poem’
Ann Yearsley, ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade’

4. The Politics of the Sublime

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan: A Vision’
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’
Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France
Immanuel Kant, from The Critique of Judgement

5. The Radical Self: Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude,

6. Poetry and Oppression: Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Prometheus Unbound
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

7. Science and Apocalypse: Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, The Last Man

8. Exile and Negativity: the Byronic hero

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred
George Gordon, Lord Byron, extracts from Cain

9. Urban Romanticism

Selections from the writings of the ‘Cockney School’ and responses to them (including Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Hazlitt, and John Gibson Lockhart)
Charles Lamb, letter to William Wordsworth, 30^th January 1801

10. Madness and Enclosure: Clare

John Clare, ‘I am’
John Clare, ‘The Flitting’
Timothy Morton, ‘John Clare’s Dark Ecology’, Studies in Romanticism, 47 (2008), 179–93

Set Texts:

Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4^th Edition (Blackwell, 2012). ISBN: 9781405190756.

Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford University Press, 2008). ISBN: 9780199552351.

Most of the primary texts are covered in the anthology. Other primary texts will be provided in hand-outs and uploaded onto Learning Central.

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991).

Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Science, 1773-1833, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002).

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press, 2008).

Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).

James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

H. W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (London: The Athlone Press, 1962).

Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987).

David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Ross Wilson (ed.), The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (London: Routledge, 2009).

Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).