This survey module offers an introduction to the first generation of Romantic poets, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Robert Burns and S. T. Coleridge as well the lesser-known poets Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson.  The module emphasises the importance of poetic analysis as well as the context of first-generation Romanticism and is aimed at students who have not previously studied poetry of the Romantic age or who wish to broaden their knowledge of the field.  As such, the module provides a relatively broad survey (rather than an in-depth study of the work of any one poet) and is organized around key themes and concepts.  Students will develop an ability to draw associations between individual works and the movement known as ‘Romanticism’ itself, exploring Romantic aesthetics, the creative imagination, the supernatural, the ballad, nature, the French Revolution, and the city.  We will also pay close attention to poetic form and metre.

discuss selected poems in detail and demonstrate an understanding of key Romantic themes and concepts. 

Two one-hour lectures and one one-hour seminar weekly. Where appropriate, students will be given handouts in lectures.  Powerpoint presentations will usually be made available to students via 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.

A take-home assessment in poetry analysis and one essay of 1600 words. 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.

Essay (1600 words) = 50%

Poetry Analysis Take-home Assessment = 50%

One
Lecture 1: Introduction to British Romantic Poetry
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), ‘Daffodils’ (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’), from Poems (1815), (Wu, p. 558), ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Lecture 2: From Enlightenment to Romanticism

Two
Lecture 1: Charlotte Smith and ‘the Failure’ of the Creative Imagination
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Selection from Elegiac Sonnets (1784).  ‘Sonnet I’ (Wu, p. 88), ‘Sonnet VIII. To Spring’ (Wu, p. 91),  ‘Sonnet V. To the South Downs’ (Wu, p. 90)
Lecture 2: Women Poets and Publishing

Three
Lecture 1: The Wordsworthian Imagination (childhood and personal narrative)
William Wordsworth, A selection of Lyrical Ballads (1798): ‘We are Seven’ (Wu, pp. 380-2), ‘Old Man Travelling’ (Wu, p. 411), ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798’, (Wu, pp. 415-20), Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth Edition, Vol. D (2012), pp. 292-304.
Lecture 2: Metre

Four
Lecture 1: Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Political/Personal Imagination
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book X ‘Residence in France’, lines 689-727 (not in Wu – see LION and/or class hand out).  Shelley, ‘England in 1819’, Wu, p. 1134
Lecture 2: Romantic Legacies: Song, Sport, Seamus Heaney and The Prelude

Five
Lecture 1: Coleridge’s ‘One Life’ Philosophy and Conversation Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1834, (composed 1795), Wu, pp. 621-5), ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ (1797) Wu, pp. 633-7, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, composed c. July 1802, from Sibylline Leaves (1817), Wu, 693-7
Lecture 2: Coleridge and ‘New Criticism’

Six
Lecture 1: Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake (1757-1827), ‘The Lamb’ (Songs of Innocence, 1789) (Wu, p. 187-8), ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Songs of Innocence, 1789)  (Wu, p. 189-90), ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Songs of Experience, 1794) (Wu, p. 202), ‘Nurses Song’,  ‘London’ (Songs of Experience, 1794) (Wu, p. 207), ‘The Tyger’ (Songs of Experience, 1794) (Wu, pp. 203-4), ‘Nurse’s Song’ (Songs of Innocence, 1789) (Wu, pp. 194-5), ‘Nurse’s Song’ (Songs of Experience, 1794), (Wu, p. 202), ‘The Divine Image’ (Songs of Innocence, 1789) (Wu, pp. 185-6), ‘A Divine Image’ (Songs of Experience, 1794) (Wu, p. 206).
Lecture 2: Romantic Art 

Seven
Lecture 1: Coleridge and the Supernatural   
S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  In Seven Parts, from Sibylline Leaves (1817), Wu, pp. 714-31
Lecture 2: The Romantic Gothic

Eight
Lecture 1: Mary Robinson and the Lake Poets
Mary Robinson (1758-1800), ‘A London Summer Morning’ (1804), Wu, pp. 253-4, ‘The Haunted Beach’ (1800), Wu, pp. 255-7, ‘Mrs Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’ (1801), Wu, pp. 259-61)
Lecture 2: The Romantic Sublime & Gender

Nine
Lecture 1: Burns and the Ballad
Robert Burns (1759-1796), ‘Tam o’ Shanter. A Tale’ (1790), Wu, pp. 275-81), ‘Song: Oh my love’s like the red, red rose’ (1796), Wu, p. 281
Lecture 2: Celtic Romanticism

Ten
Lecture 1: Revision Lecture: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads
Lecture 2: Conclusion and feedback

Eleven
Guided Study Week

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.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Romantic Period) Ninth Edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, eds., Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger is also a reliable collection of primary source material.

Secondary Reading List

General

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1985)

David Fallon and Jon Mee, Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader (2011)

Iain McCalman, gen. ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (1999)

Jane Moore and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature (2010)

Nicholas Roe, An Oxford Guide to Romanticism (2005)

John Strachan and Richard Terry, Poetry (2000)

Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (1998)

Poets

William Blake

Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995)

David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954; revised 1977)

Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947)

Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1983)

Zachary Leader, Reading Blake’s Songs (1981)

Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (1992)

E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993)

Robert Burns

Tom Crawford, Burns: A Study of Poems and Songs (1960)

David Daiches, Robert Burns: The Poet (1950, rev. 1966)

Donald A. Low, ed. Critical essays on Robert Burns (1975)

Donald A. Low, ed. Robert Burns: the critical heritage (1974)

Maureen McLane ‘Tuning the Multi-Media Nation, or, Minstrelsy of the Afro-

Scottish Border ca. 1800’, European Romantic Review, Volume 15, Number 2, June 2004, 289-305

Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic

Poetry (2008)

Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (2009)

Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1968)

John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (1959)

Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems, 1795-98 (1979)

Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (1989)

Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1998)

Paul Magnuson, Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry (1974)

Charles Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (2003)

Lucy Newlyn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2002)

Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999)

Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988)

NB: See also Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography, chapter 4, ‘Slavery and Romantic Poetry’ (2002).

Mary Robinson

Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (2004)

Anne Janowitz, Romantic Women Poets: Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson (2004)

Susan Luther, ‘A Strange Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs Robinson’, Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 391-116.

Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, 1996), pp. 94-116.

Judith Pascoe, ed., Mary Robinson, Selected Poems (1999) Stuart Curran, ‘Mary

Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism ed. Carol

Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 17-35

Lisa Vargo, ‘The Claims of “real life and manners: Coleridge and Mary Robinson’, The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995), 134-7

 Charlotte Smith

The Poems of Charlotte Smith ed. Stuart Curran (New York, 1993)

Stuart Curran, ‘The I Altered’, in Romanticism and Feminism ed. Anne K. Mellor

(1988), pp. 185-207

Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (1998)

Judith Hawley, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains’, in Women’s

Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, eds. Isobel

Armstrong and Virginia Blain (1998), pp. 184-98

Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (2003)

Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (1993)

Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet

Claim’, European Romantic Review 6 (1995), 98-127

William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, eds. Richard Gavil and Daniel Robinson (2015)

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

Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical

Ballads (1983)

Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989)

Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964)

Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989)

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

Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (1982)

Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘Wordsworth’s Borderer’, English Romantic Poets: Modern

Essays in Criticism, ed. MH Abrams  (1975)

Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Romantic Imagination’, in Duncan Wu, ed. A Companion to Romanticism (1998), pp. 486-94

Critical Approaches:

British Historical Approaches and New Historicism

Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (1984)

Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its

Background, 1760-1830 (1981)

Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, eds. English Romanticism and the Celtic World

(2003)

James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998).

Stephen Copley and John Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism (1992)

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976)

Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983)

Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth: Great Period Poems (1986)

Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age

(1987)

Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, N. J. 1981)

E. P. Thompson, The Romanticism: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thelwal: England in a Revolutionary Age, 1997)

Deconstruction and the Yale School

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967)

Paul De Man Allegories of Reading (1979) and Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984)

Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961) and The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

Feminist Criticism and Women’s Poetry

Philip Cox, Gender, Genre, and the Romantic Poets. An Introduction (1996)

Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s (2000)

Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790-1827 (1993)

Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt eds., Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (1999)

Anne Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (1988)

Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York, 1993)

Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (1989)

Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite eds, Romantic Sociability: Social networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840 (2002)

Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (eds), Re-Visioning Romanticism: British

Women Writers, 1776-1837 (1994)

Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of British Romanticism (1997)

Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (2006)

Green Romanticism

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (1972)

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

Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000)

Laurence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000)

David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003)

Leavisite and Formalist Approaches

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)

F.R. Leavis, Revaluation (1936)

I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (1934)

Lesbian and Queer Studies

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1996)

Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England (1985)

Paul Hammond, Love Between Men (1996)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire  (1985)

Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (2000)

Post-colonial criticism

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (2003)

Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (2007)

Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992)

Psychoanalysis

Joel Faflack, Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (2008)

Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude

(1989)

Daniel P. Watkins, Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry  (1996)

Reception Theory

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994)

Harold Bloom, Agon, (1982)

Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (2000)

Journals (browse current and back editions in ASSL)

European Romantic Review

Romanticism

Studies in Romanticism

The Wordsworth Circle

Websites

Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu/        

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net: http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/

Further information about recommended reading will be provided at the start of the module.