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These
are course designs I have prepared or am working on but have
not yet had the opportunity to teach. To see courses I have
taught, please visit this page.
Nineteenth-Century
British Literature
British
Romanticism
Victorian
Literature
- The
Victorian Novel
- Victorian
Non-Fiction Prose
- Victorian
Peripheries: Marginalized Figures in Nineteenth Century
British Novel
- The
Discourse of Labor in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Victorian
Sonnet Sequences
- Victorian
Patriotic Poetry
Introductory
and Survey Courses
Course
Proposal for Nineteenth-Century British Literature and National
Identity
Hearth
and home, nation and empire, sword and shield, Church and
Crown: all icons of the Romantic and Victorian eras, both
in political discourse and literary works. In this course,
we will focus on the intersections between nineteenth-century
British literature and the formation of national identity,
asking ourselves what it meant to be part of the "empire
on which the sun never sets," what it meant to be "British"
in the nineteenth-century, even if one never left Africa or
India or Scotland, even if one could not vote in elections
or attend universities. Two important concerns will drive
our inquiries: first, the personal and political in relationship
to form, namely the lyric, the novel, and the essay; and second,
the ways that the "imagined communities" of nation
and empire reinforce and impede understandings of class, race,
gender, and religion.
Our
primary texts-poetry, novels, and non-fiction prose-will focus
on six historical "events" and concerns: The French
Revolution and, by extension, the Napoleonic Wars; the Chartist
Movement and the Reform Bills; the Crimean War; Italian Risorgimento;
the Indian Mutiny or Rebellion; and the Boer War and "the
scramble for Africa." Our secondary texts will range
from historical studies to theories of national identity to
literary criticism, all selections designed to help us untangle
the myriad manifestations of "Britishness" across
the period.
Proposed
Readings:
- The
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars: Charlotte Smith,
The Emigrants and Desmond; William Blake,
America, The French Revolution, The Book
of Urizen; George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage; Anna Letitia Barbauld, "Eighteen Hundred
and Eleven"; Felicia Hemans, "Homes of England,"
"England's Dead," "Graves of England,"
"Casabianca"; Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine,
Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy
- Chartist
Movement and the Reform Bills: Peter Scheckner, ed.,
selections from An Anthology of Chartist Poetry ;
Brian Maidment, ed., selections from The Poorhouse Fugitives;
George Eliot, Felix Holt
- Crimean
War: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud, "The Charge
of the Light Brigade," "The Defense of Lucknow,"
"Locksley Hall"; Janet Hamilton, "Civil War
in America: Expostulation," "The Horror of War:
Verses Suggested By the War in the Crimea"; Mary Seacole,
The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands;
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra
- Italian
Risorgimento: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Mother
and Poet," Casa Guidi Windows; Ellen Johnston,
the "Garibaldi" poems
- Indian
Mutiny or Rebellion: Massey's "Havelock's March";
Punch's "The Pagoda Tree"; Tennyson's "The
Defense of Lucknow"; Christina Rossetti, "In the
Round Tower at Jhansi"; Rudyard Kipling, Kim;
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education"
- Boer
War and "the scramble for Africa": Thomas
Hardy, "Drummer Hodge," "Embarcation,"
"Departure," "A Wife in London"; Algernon
Charles Swinburne, "Transvaal"; Punch,
"The Tourist and the Flag"; Rudyard Kipling, "White
Man's Burden," "Recessional," "A Song
of the English"; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness;
Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness"
Select
Secondary Texts:
- Patrick
Bratlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and
Imperialism, 1830-1914;
-
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 and
The Age of Capital: 1848-1875;
- Edward
W. Said, Orientalism;
- Ernest
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism;
- Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities;
- Linda
Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation;
- Moira
Ferguson, The Romance of Italy
Course
Proposal for Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and Visual
Culture
The
story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and
distorts that which should be beautiful.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Defence of Poetry"
Poetic
creation, what is this but seeing the thing sufficiently?
The word that will describe the thing follows of itself from
such clear intense sight of the thing.
~Thomas Carlyle, The Hero as Poet (1840)
As
the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature
suggest, the focus in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory
on "seeing the object as it really is" find a unique
"counterpart in the importance of illustrating literature."
This course will focus on the interplay between the textual
and the visual in Romantic and Victorian poetry. We will consider
a variety of literary and visual forms: from personal, deliberately
subjective lyrics to dramatic monologues to aesthetic theory,
allegorical tales to historical narratives, paintings to photographs
to graphic novels to children's books. And while our explorations
will originate with literary works from 1780-1900, our investigations
will range into twentieth-century adaptations and renderings-everything
from online databases to comic books to advertisements-asking
ourselves at each juncture: what is it about this poetic work
that lends itself to visual interpretations? Does the interplay
between the visual and the textual allow us to see things
more clearly-or not?
Suggested
readings and works:
- William
Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Blake's
"illuminations"
- William
Wordsworth, "Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey"
- George
Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with
illustrations
- J.
M. W. Turner, Tintern Abbey, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
The Passage of the St. Gothard
- Charlotte
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets with illustrations
- John
Ruskin, Modern Painters (excerpts)
- Alfred
Lord Tennyson, "The Lady of Shallot" and paintings
by William Holman Hunt, William Maw Egley, John Atkinson
Grimshaw, John William Waterhouse, Arthur Hughes, John Sidney
Meteyard
- Christina
Rossetti, "Goblin Market" and illustrations by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1859), Laurence Housman (1893),
Arthur Rackham (xxxx), Margaret W. Tarrant (1912), Martin
Ware (1980)
- Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, verses and paintings
- William
Morris, "The Defense of Guenevere" and Queen
Guinevere (by William Morris, finished by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown)
- Alfred
Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"
and paintings by Elizabeth Thompson Butler (The Roll
Call (1874) and Battle of Balaclava (1875)),
photography by Roger Fenton
- Robert
Browning, "Porphyria's Lover" and graphic artist
Scott McCloud's comics
Course
Proposal for "Literature, Technology, and the Individual
in Nineteenth Century Britain"
As
Richard Altick notes in Victorian People and Ideas,
one of the worst effects of industrialization in Great Britain
was the "assimilation of the individual into the mass
. . . . hundreds of thousands were packed into the long, dismal
rows of houses near factory, mill, and mine, and their identit[ies
were] lost." Individuals were "converted into members
of the industrial proletariat [and became] mere units in a
mass." As a result of technological and scientific advancements,
people altered not only how they lived their lives, as Altick
notes, but also how they thought, wrote, and read about them.
Middle-class writings indicate anxieties about the loss of
identity; working-class writings demonstrate an insistence
on an identity not only for "the industrial proletariat,"
but also for the individual writer. The course, therefore,
will examine the relationships between literature and technological
change in nineteenth-century Britain by focusing on three
central areas: (1) discourse networks: Romanticism and mass
literacy; (2) industrialism and enterprise; (3) utilitarianism,
culture, and the critique of "machinery."
Discourse
networks:
Selections from The Poorhouse Fugitives. Ed. Brian
Maidment.
Selections from An Anthology of Chartist Poetry : Poetry
of the British Working Class, 1830s-1850s. Ed. Peter Scheckner.
Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke.
Peacock, Thomas Love. The Four Ages of Poetry.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Defense of Poetry.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical
Ballads (1798 and 1800)
Industrialism
and enterprise:
Selections from The Poorhouse Fugitives. Ed. Brian
Maidment.
Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. (1843)
Dickens, Charles. "Sunday Under Three Heads."
Eliot, George. Felix Holt.
Engels, Friedrich. excerpts from The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. (1848)
- - - . North and South (1855)
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. excerpt from A Review of Southey's
Colloquies [The Natural
Progress of Society]. (1830)
Mayhew, Henry. excerpts from London Labour and the London
Poor.
Southey, Robert. excerpts from Colloquies on the Progress
and Prospects of Society. (1829)
Utilitarianism,
culture, and the critique of "machinery":
Selections from The Poorhouse Fugitives. Ed. Brian
Maidment.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy.
Bentham, Jeremy. selections TBA.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times.
Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil.
Mauthus, Thomas. excerpts from Essay on the Principle of
Population.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty.
- - -. excerpts Principles of Political Economy
- - -. "What is Poetry?"
Ruskin, John. "The Nature of the Gothic."
Wilde, Oscar. Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Course
Proposals for Romantic Hybrids: Experiments in Poetic Form
A
standard story of the beginning of Romanticism relies on the
1798 Lyrical Ballads as the inauguration of an era.
With this volume, so the story goes, Wordsworth and Coleridge
radically reconfigured both the lyric and the ballad into
a new hybrid form, one capable of (among other things) the
individualized, personalized subjectivity of lyric coupled
with the narrative properties of ballad. Through a Wordsworthian
focus on the spontaneous overflow of feeling (a few years
later amended to include the added requirement of emotion
recollected in tranquility) and a Coleridgean focus on the
metaphysical and the supernatural, the two poets worked to
forge a new poetic form, one divested of the rigidity and
formal expectations of neoclassical verse.
Yet
we don't have to look far beyond Lyrical Ballads to
see how deeply invested many Romantic writers were in challenging
formal conventions. What purpose did these writers have in
complicating standard forms? For instance, in Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound, was it, as Tillotama Rajan has claimed, a radical
desire to dialogize the subjective univocal stance of lyric?
If so, what then do we make of Byron's Manfred, a "metaphysical"
drama designed as "mental theatre"? How does the
reconfiguration of an object, the form, subsequently reconfigure
the subject embodied in that form?
During
the course of the semester, we will examine several forms
and then deliberately and contentiously place them in a dialectic:
e.g. why is a ballad not a lyric? How are they separate? And
then what happens when that admittedly reductive binary is
shattered by the poet? Where then does one place a "lyrical
ballad," formally, generically, critically, and/or historically?
Ultimately,
our goal will be to allow these discussions to challenge our
notions about selfhood and textuality in Romantic literature.
Our ideas of genre, the particular text, and literary tradition
will be identified, investigated, and reevaluated. To this
end, we will discuss works that pre- and post-date the "Romantics,"
though the bulk of our reading and discussion energies will
center on the "Romantic" texts. In addition, we
will read two Romantic novels that depend heavily upon the
poetic for narrative development and structure, asking to
what happens to our ideas of lyrical subjectivity and prose
form when the two reach a state of interdependence.
Proposed
Readings (include but not limited to):
·
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(1794).
· Bloomfield, Robert. The Farmer's Boy (1802).
· Bryon, Manfred (1817).
· Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Eolian Harp,"
"Frost at Midnight," "This Lime-tree Bower
My Prison," "Fears in Solitude," "The
Nightingale."
· Milne, Christian. Simple Poems on Simple Subjects
(1805).
· Scott, Sir Walter. Waverly (1814).
· Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound (1820).
· Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci (1819).
· Smith, Charlotte. Elegaic Sonnets.
· Smith, Charlotte. Emmeline and/or The Young
Philosopher.
· Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1802 versions).
· William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)
Course
proposal for "Romantic Nonfiction Prose"
While
we no longer define Romanticism strictly in terms of poetry,
many general understandings about the period take their cues
from an idea of Romanticism formed by "Big Six"--Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake. Beginning with the
works of these men, let us assume that there are perhaps,
as complicated as defining Romanticism may be, a few key points
we can agree upon:
1.
Romanticism can be defined by a group of poets who were
defining themselves against both Enlightenment philosophy
and Neoclassic attitudes.
2.
Romanticism can be further defined by noting the primacy
of the human mind, the workings of the individual mind,
as well as the importance of the human faculty of imagination
in the works of Romantic writers.
3.
Romantic poets were often concerned with seizing classical
forms and transforming them through simpler language without
sacrificing the philosophical elements of the form; in other
words, a poetic revolution was a key factor in Romanticism.
4.
Finally, political revolution was of primary importance:
the belief in individual civil liberties, the shifting relationship
between master and servant, the precarious social divisions
threatened by revolt.
Yet
immediately upon establishing these tidy criteria, a problem
emerges: if we accept that the French Revolution was predicated
upon many of the tenets of Enlightenment philosophy (as number
4 above describes), and Romantic writers were inspired by
the Revolution and its foundations, then why would we also
accept that Romantic writers were defining themselves against
Enlightenment philosophy (instead of neoclassical poetic/literary
conventions)? It seems to be an either/or proposition: to
have a cohesive movement, we must be able to state with a
degree of certainty that the writers we include in that movement
were at least broadly aligned along these admittedly broad
philosophical lines. A cursory examination of the literature,
however, immediately causes such certainties to crumble.
So
from the above outlined narrative, we have left only points
2 and 3. Yet how useful are they in and of themselves? To
say that Romantic writers were interested in "imagination"
and "the human mind" seems to be so vague as to
be useless, particularly when we begin to investigate the
manifestations of these important issues in the literature.
Consider "imagination": if we only contrast Wordsworth's
and Coleridge's (to say nothing of complicating the issue
even further by bringing the later Romantic poets into the
discussion) views on the matter, we immediately discern how
varied and intricate the reactions of these writers were.
A
further--and primary--problem with the narrative above is
that it does not any room for prose writing, including the
novel. Yet if we, following M.H. Abrams, define Romanticism
by primarily poetry (if not poetry alone), then we lose not
only the novel (everything from Inchbald to Wollstonecraft
to Scott to Austen to Mary Shelley), but pamphlets (particularly
those of the "pamphlet wars" surrounding the French
Revolution), and social/political writings (William Godwin's,
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman).
Given the importance of these texts to the formation of not
only political/social thought but also literary thought during
the period, our understanding of writing of the "Romantic
Era" becomes vastly narrower if we neglect the non-fiction
prose.
This
course, "Nonfiction Prose of the Romantic Era,"should
serve as a partial corrective for this absence. Our outline
will follow these broad outlines:
- Week
One: Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
along with some Swedenborg and some Eramus Darwin's Lives
of the Plants (granted, perhaps Marriage isn't
strict nonfiction prose, but it will be a wonderful way
to start the semester--an emphasis on the fluidity of genre
and form within the period, as well as Blake as a periphery
figure among the London radicals)
- Week
Two: The Pamphlet Wars and the Revolution Controversy:
Priestley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine
- Week
Three: Revolution Controversy continued: Godwin, Wordsworth,
Coleridge (a most interesting comparison here would be Coleridge's
"The Plot Discovered" with some of Godwin's writings
on the Two Bills threat to freedom of speech, particularly
to contrast Coleridge's fiery, passionate rhetoric with
Godwin's much more statesmanlike diplomatic approach)
- Week
Four: Wollstonecraft, Vindications of the Rights
of Woman (would be very interesting to include a couple
of Barbauld verses, particularly "To a Lady with Some
Painted Flowers"--the verse Wollstonecraft prints and
calls "ignoble" in Vindication--and Barbauld's
response: "The Rights of Woman"; would also be
very productive to talk a bit about Blake's Visions of
the Daughters of Albion)
- Week
Five: William Godwin, Political Justice; Bentham,
Political Economy; More, "Cheap Repository Tracts"
(possibly Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman (focusing
in on Jemima's story) as a criticism of and response to
More's proposed solutions for the poor; also possible are
some of Ann Yearsley's prose responses to More, particularly
to compare and contrast prefaces from Poems on Several
Occasions and Poems on Various Subjects)
- Week
Six: Barbauld, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing"
along with Baillie on the drama;
- Week
Seven: Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads;
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals (would be very
interesting to also read some selected verse, perhaps "Tintern
Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," maybe
the "Intimations of Immortality Ode" to test Wordsworth's
theories about poetry on his own poetry)
- Week
Eight: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
- Week
Nine: De Quincey, Confession of an English Opium
Eater
- Week
Ten: Thomas Love Peacock, "Four Ages of Poetry";
Shelley, Defence of Poetry
- Week
Eleven: Byron's Parliamentary Speeches
- Week
Twelve: Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks' Tour
- Week
Thirteen: Keats, letters; Landon, "On the Ancient
and Modern Influence of Poetry"
- Week
Fourteen: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Though it
didn't appear in book form until 1838, it was serialized
in U.S. as early as 33. Carlyle will make not only a great
way to end the Romantic era--we will have the pleasure of
comparing his thundering rhetoric with an early Romantic,
the equally powerful and booming Coleridge--but a perfect
way to point ourselves toward the next phase of English
revolutionary unrest coming in the 40. In this way we will
begin and end the semester with revolution. It would be
tempting to do Past and Present, but that just feels
too late for this course.)
A
few themes we will stress:
- revolution:
We can structure the period around revolution and war: the
French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and revolutionary
fears that culminate in the 40s. We could take a few texts
as the epitome of various English reactions to the revolution:
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Wollstonecraft's Vindications of the Rights of Man,
and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, although given
the time it would be most productive to examine other reactions,
particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. As I note above,
ending the semester with Carlyle would provide an interesting
contrast, not only rhetorically, but thematically and formally
as well.
- literary
theory: We will touch on not only the often studied
poetic theory (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats),
but theories of the other genres (Barbauld-novel, Baillie-drama)
and some less frequently read poetic theory (Landon, Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell as his version of the development
of the poetic-prophetic mind). Unfortunately, I don't immediately
see room for Kant or Rousseau early in the semester, nor
do I see room for Lyell (though he obviously doesn't belong
in the "literary theory" section) later on; both
instances are unfortunate, and I imagine I might try to
work something in, at least some excerpts.
- social
constructions/political roles: Godwin's writings, Wollstonecraft's
volumes, Bentham's theories, More's tracts, Yearsley's reaction
to More, and Byron's speeches would provide an overview
of various thought and approaches to the multitude of sociopolitical
issues confronting the writer/philosopher of the late 18th-early
19th century.
- form:
We would continually remind ourselves to take into consideration
the role of form in formulating and disseminating all of
these thoughts; our investigations would include everything
from pamphlets to recorded speeches to diaries to travelogues.
- contradicting
the narrative of Romanticism given above: One of the
primary forces driving the compilation of the above works
is the desire to complicate, and in many ways, render invalid
the idea of a cohesive, poetic Romanticism. It would be
my hope that by the end of the term, we would all have come
to a vastly different "story" of the Romantic
era, one enriched by the vast number of compelling, difficult,
and exhilarating non-fiction prose texts.
Course
proposal for "Defining Romanticism"
Even
a cursory glance over the proposed aims of this class will
reveal the course title for the terribly misleading monster
that it indeed is. Nevertheless, and not a little perversely,
such a misleading title is necessary, for it sets the tone
for what I hope will be a class rife with surprises-some pleasant,
some not-and contradictions-some expected, some not.
At
the root of this course proposal lies a contentious and perhaps
unanswerable question: What is Romanticism? Can we with any
degree of competency discuss something called "British
Romantic Literature"? As we, as students, scholars, and
(maybe most importantly) teachers of literature written from
roughly 1780-1830, attempt to work through and prepare course
syllabi, conference proposals, and essays, are we not all
haunted by the seeming instability of the terminology we find
ourselves using again and again?
Consider
the various versions of the "history of 'Romanticism'"
offered to students by popular literature anthologies:
- We
have deliberately avoided using the terms "Romantic"
or "Romanticism" to describe the historical period
represented in this anthology. These terms are themselves
the product of a specific historical and critical process
that did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century.
As the name of a literary movement or a kind of art,
"Romantic" or "Romanticism" came into
widespread use only in the early twentieth century.
(Mellor and Matlak, British Literature 1780-1830,
emphasis mine, 2)
- Writers
in Wordsworth's lifetime did not think of themselves as
"Romantic"; the word was not applied until
half a century later, by English historians. (The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, emphasis mine,
5)
So
when did "Romanticism" as a term begin (to say nothing
of the problem of actually dating the period)? Was it the
early twentieth century, as Mellor and Matlak would have us
believe? Or was it earlier, in the mid/later nineteeth century,
as Abrams, et al, suggest?
We
will embark not on a search for a definitive answer, but instead
an exploration of the roots of "Romanticism," and
not one that begins with the 1950s, World War II, or even
the mid-nineteenth century. Instead, I propose that we retrace
the development of "Romanticism" for ourselves,
and by doing so attempt to come to an understanding of the
175 years of critical history that led to the Abrams-McGann-Mellor
debate of the past fifty years in American literary scholarship.
As we employ ourselves with an intensive examination of these
diverse and difficult texts, we will be reminded continually
that "Romantic" has a long, rich, diverse, and complicated
heritage, full of debate, disagreements, and dissension.
We
will engage closely with a variety of texts and perspectives
ranging from Schlegel's Vienna lectures of 1808-9 and Coleridge's
subsequent lectures on Schlegel in England; Wordworth's "Preface"
to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria,
and Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry"; nineteenth-century
formulation of descriptors for the writers we now call Romantic;
World War II controversies over the effects of romantic individualism,
facism, and radical democracy; and finally, post-structuralist,
new historicist, and feminist responses to both contemporary
and historical texts.
Proposed
texts (some in their entirety and some excerpted):
- excerpts
from Schelgel's Lectures (delivered in Vienna 1808-09; published
1809-11) [for a distinction between the "classical"
and the "romantic"]
- Coleridge's
lectures on Schlegel, collected in Literary Remains
- Madame
de Stael's De L'Allemagne (1813)
- Francis
Jeffrey's reviews of the "Lake School" poets and
reviews of Scott (1802, 1816)
- Wordsworth's
"Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802)
- Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria (1817)
- Shelley's
"A Defence of Poetry"
- William
Hazlett's "On the Living Poets," Lectures on
the English Poets (1818)
- Thomas
B. Shaw's "The Dawn of Romantic Poetry," A
History of English Literature (originally published
in 1849; collected in this volume 1864)
- Hippolyte
Taine, History of English Literature (1863)
- Edward
Dowden's The French Revolution and English Literature
(1897)
- William
John Courthope's The Romantic Movement in English Poetry,
The Effects of the French Revolution (1910)
- Irving
Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism (1919)
- Albert
Guerard's The France of Tomorrow (1942)
- Jacques
Barzun's "To the Rescue of Romanticism." American
Scholar (1941)
- Northrop
Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947)
- René
Wellek, "The Concept of 'Romanticism' in Literary History"
Comparative Literature 1.1 (1949)
- M.
H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
- Harold
Bloom's "The Internalization of Quest-Romance"
The Yale Review (1969)
- Paul
de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality" Blindness
and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(1st published 1969; collected 1983)
- Romanticism
and Language ed. Arden Reed
- Jerome
McGann's The Romantic Ideology (1983)
- Mary
Poovey's The Proper Lady and Woman Writer (1984)
- Anne
Mellor's Romanticism and Feminism ed. (1988); Romanticism
and Gender (1993)
- Romantic
Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices ed. Paula R.
Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (1995)
Course
Proposal for The English Sonnet Tradition
Upon
publication, British Romantic writer Charlotte Smith's Elegiac
Sonnets received a range set of reactions. Some critics
rhapsodically praised the volume; others, not so much. Anna
Seward, for example, found Smith's sonnets "barren of
original ideas and poetical imagery," a "mere flow
of melancholy and harmonious numbers, full of notorious plagiarisms."
But as derogatory as this criticism was, these were not Seward's
most stinging remarks: "You observe, that, till Mrs.
Smith's sonnets appeared, you had considered the sonnet as
a light and trivial composition. Boileau says that 'Apollo,
tired with votaries who assumed the name of poet, on the slight
pretense of tagging flimsy rhymes, invented the strict, the
rigorous sonnet as a test of skill;'-but it was legitimate
sonnet which Boileau meant, not that facile form of verse
which Mrs. Smith has taken, three elegiac stanzas closing
with a couplet. Petrarch's, and Milton's, and Warton's sonnets
are legitimate."
Ah-legitimate.
What a powerful and potent word. To hear Seward describe Smith
as a sonneteer, not only was she devoid of poetic power and
possibly a plagiarist, but also she had chosen a version of
the sonnet that was not reasonable, justifiable, or proper,
undoubtedly her most serious offense. How did the sonnet come
to have such powerful associations? Why the emphasis on the
"legitimacy" of certain variations and the denigration
of others? Why would this lyrical form hold such fascination
for poets and be worthy of such ferocious policing by critics?
From
the early modern period through the twentieth century, English
poets have turned to the sonnet for its lyrical properties
and metrical challenges as a chance to test their skills,
as Seward alludes. But the sonnet is more than a versifying
obstacle course; it provides the poet a chance to create,
as Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in the opening of House
of Life, "a moment's monument." Perhaps another
reason for the popularity of the sonnet form has to do with
the appeal of the sonnet sequence: the compelling and complicated
intersection of a seemingly self-contained poetic unit, the
individual sonnet, with the narrative possibilities of a sequence
of individual lyrics. This course will explore the deployment
of the sonnet sequence or collection for a variety of purposes,
including the amatory, but others as well: political and social
critique, artistic manifesto, familial devotion.
Proposed
texts:
- Sir
Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1598)
- Edmund
Spenser, Amoretti (1595)
- William
Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609)
- John
Donne, Holy Sonnets (first pub 1633)
- Lady
Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621)
- William
Wordsworth, political/national sonnets and The River
Duddon
- Charlotte
Smith, Elegaic Sonnets
- Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
- George
Meredith, Modern Love
- Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, House of Life
- George
Eliot, Brother and Sister
- Augusta
Webster, Mother and Daughter
- Dylan
Thomas, Altarwise by Owl-light (1936
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