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 different 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 different Romanticisms.
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:Indicative topics: 1) defining Romanticism; 2) historical and intellectual context and political writing of the Revolutionary period; 3) eighteenth-century poetry and pre-Romanticism; 4) Romanticism and ordinary language and life; 5) Romanticism and psychology; 6) Romanticism, the urban, class, and politics; 7) Romanticism, travel, and exile; 8) Romanticism and Gothic; 9) Romantic autobiography and prose essays; 10) Romanticism, race, and slavery; 11) Global and transatlantic Romanticisms, and legacies of Romanticism; 12) Romanticism, gender, and feminism.
Indicative authors: Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt.
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 variations on an idea that was central to early nineteenth-century culture, but which has always been contested and controversial: Romanticism. We explore how different forms of Romanticism emerged out of a ferment of political, social, cultural and intellectual revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century, through the representations and reactions these revolutions provoked. We will examine key concepts such as the rights of man (and woman), the sublime, sensibility, the imagination, progressive and pessimistic visions of society and human nature, and the beginnings of mass popular culture. We look at the representation of the changing landscapes of country and city, Romantic writers in a global context, and the role that different ‘Romanticisms’ play in modern psychology, politics and poetics. Among other topics, this module examines debates around slavery and global emancipation movements in the Romantic period, and includes BAME voices such as (indicative examples) the American poet Phyllis Wheatley and the autobiography of Mary Prince.