Teaching Responsibility
LJMU Schools involved in Delivery:
Humanities and Social Science
Learning Methods
Lecture
Seminar
Tutorial
Workshop
Module Offerings
5111ENGL-SEP-MTP
Aims
1. To develop students' understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature, in a variety of forms and genres (principally lyric and narrative poetry, fiction, and prose writing), and to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes.
2. To explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.
3. To introduce students to critical debates and controversies about Romanticism and its legacies in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including its canonical role in English studies.
Learning Outcomes
1.
Identify and appraise the characteristics, conventions and complexities of Romanticism in a number of nineteenth-century literary forms and genres, especially poetry, using close textual analysis.
2.
Demonstrate contextual knowledge of the historical, political, and social context for Romantic literature in nineteenth-century Britain and the wider world.
3.
Link formal and aesthetic modes to wider context, and the concerns and goals of individual authors.
4.
Understand and engage with the major critical debates about Romanticism, Romantic texts and authors, and be able to situate these debates with regard to their importance in English studies.
Module Content
Outline Syllabus:1. What is Romanticism?
Indicative reading: critical definitions, controversies and defences.
2. The Revolution Controversy
Indicative reading: excerpts from Burke, Reflections, Paine, Rights of Man, Godwin, Wollstonecraft.
3. Lyrical Ballads and after
Indicative reading: poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
4. Romantic poetry by women
Indicative Reading: Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Mary Robinson, Lyrical Tales, Anna Barbauld.
5. Romanticism, sensibility, and the novel.
Indicative reading: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent.
6. Romantic life writing in poetry and prose:
Indicative reading: excerpts from The Prelude, Biographia Literaria.
7. Psychological Romanticism.
Indicative reading: post-L.B. poetry by Coleridge; Romantic writing on Shakespeare.
8. Metropolitan Romanticism: the Cockney School.
Indicative reading: poetry by Keats and Leigh Hunt, excerpts from periodical writing.
9. Cosmopolitan Romanticism.
Indicative reading: poetry by Shelley, Byron, Felicia Hemans.
10. Gothic Romanticism
Indicative reading: Lewis, The Monk, James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.
11 Reflective Romanticism: the familiar essay.
Indicative reading: Hazlitt, ‘The Letter Bell’, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’; De Quincey, ‘Recollections’, Charles and Mary Lamb.
Module Overview:
In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.
In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.
Additional Information:This module examines a concept and a mode that is central to nineteenth-century literature, yet also highly contested: Romanticism. It examines how Romanticism emerged out of a ferment of political, social, and intellectual revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century, through the very different representations and reactions these revolutions elicited. The module examines key concepts such as the sublime, creativity and the imagination, sensibility, progressive and pessimistic visions of society and human nature, and the difficult beginnings of a democratic mass popular culture. It looks at the representation of the changing landscapes of country and city, Romanticism in a global context, and the role that Romanticism played in shaping thinking about the experience and psychological effects of living in the modern world. Given that Romanticism is as much an aesthetic category as a historical period, the module is deeply concerned with assessing different modes and values of ‘the Romantic’ across cultural forms and genres, and has a particular focus on poetry in perhaps the last period that poets and their work were vitally central to British cultural life.