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ENGL 207: British Romanticism

Course Aims and Objectives:
This course is divided into four key areas across the two terms: Revolution; Women and Children; Gothic; Second Generation Romanticism

In the first term, we will begin by examining the relationship between Romanticism and revolution, particularly in terms of the events of the French Revolution which help to define the period.  We will then consider how ideas generated during the period related to issues of gender, developing this theme to examine poetry by women, and considering the importance of re-educating as a means for bringing about change within the period.

In the first half of the second term, the course will turn its attention to the popular literary movement of ‘Gothic’ which emerges during the Romantic period, exploring its manifestation in a range of texts. In the second half, with a wider context now fully established, we examine the relationship between religion, identity and society for the major second generation poets, examining some of the more complex underlying ideas about the workings of the mind, of identity, and of the imagination as they find expression in the major writers of the period.

The course aims to give students a well-rounded sense of Romanticism as a full development of earlier eighteenth-century ideas and movements as well as a distinct period in itself. We will work out of close knowledge of key texts in order to begin to tackle some of the wider, more abstract ideas such as: nature; imagination; the sublime. We will also consider literary ideas within a broader social, historical and philosophical context.

Assessment:
1 x ‘take home’ close reading paper (10%); 1 x 2,000-word essay (30%); 1 x 2.5 hour exam (60%).

Submission Deadlines:
Take-home essay paper = to be handed in by 12 noon, Monday Week 10/Term 1
Essay = by 12 noon on Monday Week 10/ Term 2.

Contact:
1 50 minute lecture and one 50 minute seminar per week.

Learning Outcomes:

• a detailed knowledge of core Romantic texts
• an ability to make connections between writers and genres
• an historical overview of the period
• a sense of the main theoretical approaches to Romanticism and how to apply them
• an understanding of key poetic and philosophical ideas in the period
• confidence in articulating ideas and presenting them orally

Set Texts:

Romanticism, An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (3rd Edition, 2005). For poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Byron and a range of women poets.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (any affordable edition but Oxford World Classics, Penguin recommended)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (World Classics)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (any affordable edition, Penguin, World Classics)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (any, but preferably the 1818 edition)

N.B. Also: Romanticism: A Source Book, ed. Simon Bainbridge (2008) – not a set text, but contains useful additional contexts, especially for ‘Women’ and ‘Revolution’.

Lecturers: CLS = Dr Catherine Spooner; KAH = Prof Keith Hanley; KLE = Dr Kamilla Elliott; PA = Dr Polly Atkin; SCB = Dr Sally Bushell; SJJB = Prof Simon Bainbridge.

Term 1

Term 2

Term 3

Back to: ENGL 204

Forward to: ENGL 208

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