This module studies the canonical second-generation Romantic poets, Keats, Byron and Shelley, together with some of their lesser-known contemporaries, who were tremendously popular in their day but have since fallen into relative critical neglect, namely, the Welsh-identified poet Felicia Hemans, the Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the English ‘peasant’ poet, John Clare.  Students will develop an ability to draw associations between individual works and the movement known as second-generation Romanticism, exploring Romantic aesthetics, the creative imagination, eroticism, and song.  We will also pay close attention to poetic form and metre.

On completion of the module students should be able to discuss selected poems in detail and demonstrate an understanding of second-generation Romanticism. 

One lecture weekly and two seminars weekly, the latter delivered in a double timetable slot.  Where appropriate, students will be given handouts in lectures.  Power-point presentations will usually be made available to students on Learning Central a week in advance of the session. During the seminar students will be asked to work in small groups and give oral reports to the group.  They might also be asked to give brief presentations and read poems aloud. The ability to present information orally in a precise and succinct manner is a key employability skill, and one that will be practised in seminar discussion. 

This module will develop specific skills.  Students will become familiar with the techniques and tools of poetic analysis, as they develop and enhance their ability to assimilate knowledge of key Romantic concepts and formal techniques.  The close reading of poetic texts and discussion of their contexts will develop a literary and historical awareness.  Employability skills include the ability to synthesise information, debate ideas and produce written arguments in a clear, precise and professional manner.

One essay of 3,200 words to be submitted at end of the semester.  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 module guide; there are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

The primary text for the module is Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism.  An Anthology.  Fourth Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2012).  This is the best anthology in the field.  It provides the widest available selection of the poetry of the period with in-depth historical headnotes and footnotes as well as valuable reading lists and a time-line.  For an overview of the Romantic period and the poems discussed on the module, see Jane Moore and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature (London: Palgrave, 2010).  The best introduction to the study and writing of poetry is John Strachan and Richard Terry, Poetry, Second Edition (Edinburgh: EUP, 2011).  Students will be expected to have read the primary texts in preparation for the lectures and seminars.  Required reading for the weekly lectures is listed below but students are also encouraged to read more widely. 

ONE             
Lecture:           Introduction to the Second Generation Romantic Poets
Seminar:          ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan

TWO
Lecture:           Byron and the Augustan tradition
                        George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, ‘Dedication’ (Wu, pp. 959-63) and ‘Canto I’ (Wu, pp. 964-1015)
Seminar:          ‘Canto I’, Don Juan
                        Essay Writing

THREE
Lecture:           Keats’s Narrative Poetry
                        ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ (Wu, pp. 1446-57)
Seminar:          ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’
                         Henry Holman Hunt’s and John Everett Millais’s paintings based on ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

FOUR
Lecture:           Keats and the Imagination
                        ‘Letter from John Keats to George and Tom Keats’, 21 December 1817 (Wu, pp. 1404-05),
                        ‘Letter from John Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818’, (Wu, 1406-07).  
                        ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (Wu, 1395-99).
Seminar:          Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ & ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
                        & Essay Writing

FIVE
Lecture:           Shelley and the Imagination
                        Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, (Wu, pp. 1101-3),
                        ‘To a Skylark’ (pp. 1215-17), ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (Wu, pp. 1233-47).
Seminar:          ‘A Defence of Poetry’

SIX    
Lecture:           Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Hemans and Byron.  
                        Felicia Hemans, ‘The Switzer’s Wife’ (Wu, pp. 1312-15); Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas 11-18 (Wu, pp. 880-82), Canto IV, stanzas 25, 78, 128-31 (class handout)
Seminar:          Voice in Hemans
                        ‘Homes of England’ & ‘The Switzer’s Wife’
                        & Essay Writing

SEVEN
Lecture:           Felicia Hemans: Romantic patriotism
                        From Welsh Melodies, ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’ (Wu, pp. 1296-7), ‘Taliesin’s Prophecy’, ‘The Meeting of the Bards’ (class handout)
Seminar:          Music & Lyric: Hemans & Thomas Moore
                        ‘The Rock of Cader Idris’ & ‘Minstrel Boy’
                        & Essay Writing

EIGHT
Lecture:           Thomas Moore: Romantic patriotism
                        Selected poems from Irish Melodies (class handout)
                         ‘The Harp that Once’, ‘Oh Breathe not his Name’, ‘She is Far from the Land’, ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’
Seminar:          Review Seminar/ Group Discussion:
                         Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of A Concept’ & Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Romantic Imagination’, both in Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: 1998), pp. 3-11 and 486-94.

NINE
Lecture:           John Clare: Eco-Romanticism
                        ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, (Wu, pp. 1273-75),‘To the Snipe’ (Wu, pp. 1275-78), ‘The Badger’ (Wu, pp. 1284-85), ‘I am’ (Wu, p. 1286)
Seminar:          ‘To the Snipe’
                        & The New Nature Writing

TEN
Lecture:           Essay writing
Seminar:          Essay consultations

ELEVEN  GUIDED STUDY WEEK

Select Secondary Reading

Lord Byron
Beattie, Bernard and Vincent Newey, eds, Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988)
Franklin, Caroline, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
McGann, Jerome, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
Wolfson, Susan, ----, ‘ “Their She Condition”: Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan,’ English Literary History 54 (1987), 585-617

P.B. Shelley
Cronin, Richard, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London, 1981)
Duff, David, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit ((1974), London: Harper Collins, 2005)
Keach, William, Shelley’s Style (London: Methuen, 1984)
Collected Satires I: Shorter Satires ed. Nicholas Mason, British Satire, 1785-1840, gen. ed. John Strachan (5 Vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Vol 1, pp. 23-9

John Keats
Cox, Jeffrey N., Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Levinson, Marjorie, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Roe, Nicholas, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Stillinger, Jack, 20^th Century interpretations of Keats’s Odes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J : Prentice-Hall, 1968)
-------------------Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009)
Strachan, John, ed,. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on The Poems of John Keats (London: Routledge, 2003)
Wolfson, Susan J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Wolfson, Susan J, Reading John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

John Clare
Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)
Bate, Jonathan, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000)
Bate, Jonathan, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003)
Haughton, Hugh, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds, John Clare in Context  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Perkins, David, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Comet, Noah, Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) [On Order ASSL]
Gary Kelly ed., Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002)
Leighton, Angela, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 8-44.
Lootens,Tricia,  ‘Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine “Internal Enemies” and the Domestication of National Identity’, PMLA 109 (1994), 238-53
McGann, Jerome J., The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Oxford
Mellor, Anne K, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 123-43
Ross, Marlon B, The Contours of Masculine Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 232-310.
Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodlophi, 2000)
Sweet, Nanora,  ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. Mary Favret and Nicola Watson (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1994), pp. 170-84
Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk eds., Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)

Thomas Moore
Campbell, Matthew, “Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: The 1821 Irish Melodies”, Bullán 4, 2 (2000), 83-103 
Davis, Leith, ‘Irish Bards and English Consumers: Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the Colonized Nation’, Ariel 24 (1993), 7-25
Deane, Seamus, ‘Thomas Moore’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing  3 Vols (Derry: Field Day, 1991), Vol. 1
Eagleton, Terry, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), ‘The Masochism of Thomas Moore’, pp. 140-57
Hunt, Una, Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies (London: Routledge, 2017) [On Order ASSL]
Larrissy, Edward, ‘The Celtic Bard of Romanticism: Blindness and Second Sight’, Romanticism, 5:1 (1999), 43-57
McCleave, Sarah, and Brian G. Caraher eds., Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration: Poetry, Music, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2018.  [On Order ASSL]
McLane, Maureen, ‘The figure minstrelsy makes: poetry and historicity’, Critical Inquiry 29:3 (2003), 429-52
Vail, Jeffery W., The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron & Thomas Moore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press University Press, 2001), chapter 3
Welch, Robert,  Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Bucks: Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1980)

1. Collections:
The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. by Ian McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780-1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992)
English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. By M. H. Abrams, 2^nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. by Marjorie Levinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)
Romanticism, ed. by Cynthia Chase (London: Longman, 1993)
Romanticism: A Critical Reader, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
Romanticism and Feminism, ed. by Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789-1837, ed. by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Romantic Women Poets, 1770-1838, ed. by Andrew Ashfield, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)
Romantic Writings, ed. by Stephen Bygrave (New York: Routledge, 1996) (includes useful essay by Amanda Gilroy on ‘Women Poets, 1780-1830)

2. Monographs and Essays:
Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
Cox, Philip, Gender, Genre, and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
Deane, Seamus, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: Norton, 1988)
Jacobus, Mary, Romanticism: Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Labbe, Jacqueline, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
----, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
Manning, Peter J. Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Mellor, Anne K., Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Moore, Jane and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature (London: Palgrave, 2010)
Newlyn, Lucy, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the language of allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
Rajan, Tillotama, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980)
Ross, Marlon, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Wolfson, Susan, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Wolfson, Susan, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)

Websites
Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu/
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net: http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/