Provisional course schedule: 

 

1. Introduction:syllabus, main topics and poets; overview of the Romantic period; the eighteenth-century background.

 

2. Introduction to the course continued: What was the Romantic philosophy and where did it come from? How did it differ from earlier literary movements and periods? Contexts: Rousseau; Goethe; Edmund Burke; Joanna Baillie; William Wordsworth.  

 

3. Poetry and revolution: why was the first generation of Romantic poets inspired by the French Revolution, and how did they develop revolutionary ideas to define the role of poet? Relevant poetry selected from: Wordsworth, extracts from The Prelude, Books 6 and 8, and Descriptive Sketches (1793); Coleridge, extracts from Religious Musings (1794). Contexts: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790); Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1792); William Blake, America, A Prophecy (1793); The French Revolution (1791). 

 

4. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (c. 1794). Key topics: the theme of childhood; how does Blake write about religion, hypocrisy, sexual morality, social injustice? Midterm 1 worksheets assigned (20 %).

 

5. Songs of Innocence and of Experience continued. 

 

6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads, 1798, 1800. Why has this collection of poems been seen as revolutionary and controversial? What was new about the subjects, form and language the poets used? What was inspirational about nature and the English landscape for these poets? Other relevant works: Mary Robinson, Lyrical Tales (1800); Robert Southey, ‘The Well of St. Keyne’ (1798) and ‘The Old Man’s Complaints’ (1799); Charlotte Smith, sonnets.      

 

7. Lyrical Ballads continued; the Wordsworth circle: nature, landscape and the self: Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1802-4), ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1807), ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’ (1833), extract from The Prelude, Book 3; Dorothy Wordsworth (extracts from journals). 

 

8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Coleridge’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads (extract from Biographia Literaria, 1815); poems selected from: ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’ (1800), ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802), ‘Kubla Kahn, or, A Vision in a Dream’ (1797-8). Contexts: ‘The Satanic Hero’ (short prose extract from Biographia Literaria, 1817).

 

9. Gothic, medievalism and the supernatural: why did Romantic poets want to write about “…the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii and secret talismans” (Coleridge)? Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ‘Christabel’ (1797-1801). Other relevant poems: Mary Robinson, ‘The Haunted Beach’; Keats, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ (1819), ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819), ‘Lamia’ (1819).

 

10. Later Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley and their circle (George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley); how did later Romantic poets explore humankind’s search for knowledge, self-determination and new experiences? Contexts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818); Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1818-19); Byron, Manfred (1816-17), Oriental Tales (1813-14), selected poems.  

 

11. Poetry of Shelley, from: ‘Mutability’, ‘To Wordsworth’ (1814-15), ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819), political poetry.     

 

12. John Keats: study of his career, ideas and key poems.

 

13. John Keats, Odes of 1819.

 

14. Revision and preparation for exam.