• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Undergraduate Menu

Search using keywords/tags or full text search.

ENGL 367: The Byron-Shelley Circle

Course Convenor: Prof Simon Bainbridge

Seminar Time and Venue: Thursday 9am – 11am, Bowland North SR21 (Term 2)

Course Aims and Objectives:
This course examines the work of three of the great writers of the Romantic period, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and the novelist Mary Shelley. Famously, these three writers lived and worked together during the summer of 1816, an episode that produced two of the dominant myths of modern literature – Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley’s novel) and the Vampire (in a story based on Byron by another member of the group, John Polidori) – both of which we will examine. Throughout their careers these writers were engaged in a creative and critical conversation with each other that addressed major themes including: conceptions of the heroic; the possibilities of political change; literary, scientific and biological creation; the East; transgressive love; gender roles; and the Gothic. This course will provide an opportunity to study in detail these writers’ works and to consider them within their historical, cultural and intellectual contexts.

Assessment:
1 x 1,500-word close reading exercise (20%); 1 x 4,000-word essay (80%).

Submission Deadlines:
Close reading exercise by 12 noon, Monday Week 7, Term 2.
Essay by 12 noon, Monday Week 1, Term 3.

Contact Hours:
1 two-hour seminar per week (with the exception of Independent Study Week).

Learning Outcomes:
On successful completion of this course students will have:

• acquired an understanding of the writings of members of the Byron-Shelley circle and of the relations between these writings
• identified key themes in the writings of the Byron-Shelley circle and explored different treatments of them
• investigated the uses of literary forms in the writings of the Byron-Shelley circle
• related the literature to historical, cultural, and literary contexts
• gained a sense of the nature of the contemporary critique of the members and writings of the Byron-Shelley circle
• considered a range of critical and theoretical approaches to the texts
• developed skills of close reading and analysis
• developed communication and writings skills through seminar participation and completion of assessments

Set Texts:
Byron
Byron, the Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford U.P., 2008)

Percy Shelley
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Norton, 2002)

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle (Penguin, 1992)
The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994)

Seminar Topics:

Week 1
Introduction

Week 2
The Byronic Hero, Orientalism and Gender I:
Byron, The Giaour

Week 3
The Byronic Hero, Orientalism and Gender II:
Byron, Don Juan, cantos V & VI

Week 4
Percy Shelley: Selected Poems:
‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘To a Sky-Lark’, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Sonnet: England in 1819

Week 5
The Romantic Prometheus I:
Byron, ‘Prometheus’; Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Week 6
Independent Study Week
1,500 word close reading exercise (to be submitted 12pm, Monday Week 7)

Week 7
The Romantic Prometheus II:
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

Week 8
Romantic Italy:
Byron, Beppo; Percy Shelley, ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’

Week 9
Mary Shelley:
The Last Man

Week 10
The Contemporary Critique of Romanticism:
Percy Shelley, Julian and Maddalo; John Polidori, ‘The Vampyre’.

Back to: ENGL 365

Forward to: ENGL 369

Courses Index