Module Information
Module Identifier
ENM2540
Module Title
Romanticism's Radical Cultures, 1789-1823
Academic Year
2015/2016
Co-ordinator
Semester
Semester 2
Course Delivery
Assessment
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Assessment | Semester A 20-minute individual orally presented research paper, to be delivered in week 7. Accompanying documentation to include an annotated bibliography, any presentation materials used and an electronic copy of the PowerPoint presentation. Oral Presentation | 40% |
| Semester Assessment | Semester 6000 word essay | 60% |
| Supplementary Assessment | Supplementary Resubmit failed or make good any missing elements. In the event of failure in the oral presentation element, a 20-minute written script on a new topic to be submitted, written as if for delivery, to include an annotated bibliography, any presentation materials used and an electronic copy of the PowerPoint presentation | 100% |
Content
Weeks 1-5: Focusing on the response of the first generation Romantics to revolutionary upheaval, the first half of the module explores the interface between literature and radical culture in a seminal decade. It acquaints students with the complex ways in which canonical and non-canonical writers negotiated `history'. Students will be introduced to the period's great social, political, religious and intellectual debates, to a range of literary responses to revolution, and to the `reticular culture' and literary `dialogues' of the period. These five sessions also seek to foreground and question the theoretical and methodological debates of contemporary Romantic scholarship.
Weeks 6-10: These seminars acquaint students with a range of political contexts and co-texts to second-generation Romantic writing. Students will investigate how writers allude to - and/or seek to elude - the fraught contours of the political landscape, examining the web-like structures of allegiance and shared purpose connecting politically motivated authors. Individual sessions address the politics of language and taste in the Romantic period, and also explore different constructions of Romantic masculinity and power.
Seminar Programme
1. `The Master-Pamphlets of the Day'
This opening session establishes the historical and conceptual ground of the module by introducing students to some of the major intellectual debates of the great pamphlet war known as the `Revolution Controversy'. It focuses in particular on the rhetoric of revolution - how revolution is `performed'.
Texts: Excerpts from the writings of Price, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Paine, together with critical material.
2. `Stamping the Stony Law to Dust': Radical Blake
This session examines how Blake's dramatic and idiosyncratic 1790s poetry and graphic art intervene in contemporary debates about political, religious and moral freedom. What do these works have to say about the institutional oppression of children, slaves and women?
Texts: The French Revolution; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (selections); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; America.
3. `Pretty Hot in It': Coleridge and Wordsworth - The Radical Years
This session profiles the changing radical selves of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 1790s and their involvement in the radical culture of a tempestuous decade. In what conflicted ways do these poets articulate social protest? What was Wordsworth's experience of revolutionary France? How do these poems locate the individual subject in relation to wider cultural and political forces?
Texts: Coleridge - Selections from Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion and the letters; `Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement'; `France: An Ode'; `Frost at Midnight'; `Fears in Solitude'; Wordsworth - A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; `Adventures on Salisbury Plain', various poems from Lyrical Ballads and selections from The Prelude, Books IX and X.
4. `Hunting the Jacobin Fox': Godwin's Caleb Williams and John Thelwall
This session examines Godwin's famous `jacobin' novel of 1794 as political intervention. It also engages dialogically with a `case study' of the radical orator, political theorist and poet John Thelwall, who became `the most representative figure of state persecution' in the 1790s and was effectively shut down by Pitt's government and driven into `inner exile' in Wales.
Texts: Godwin's Caleb Williams and The `Prefatory Memoir' and selected poems from Thelwall's Poems, Chiefly Written In Retirement, together with co-texts by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
5. Romanticism, History, Historicism I: The Politics of `Tintern Abbey'
Taking Wordsworth's paradigmatic poem as a `test-case', this session introduces students to various historicist readings of `Tintern Abbey', which has become a battle-ground for competing constructions of the Romantics' engagement with, and elision of, history.
Articles by: Marjorie Levinson, Thomas Mc
Weeks 6-10: These seminars acquaint students with a range of political contexts and co-texts to second-generation Romantic writing. Students will investigate how writers allude to - and/or seek to elude - the fraught contours of the political landscape, examining the web-like structures of allegiance and shared purpose connecting politically motivated authors. Individual sessions address the politics of language and taste in the Romantic period, and also explore different constructions of Romantic masculinity and power.
Seminar Programme
1. `The Master-Pamphlets of the Day'
This opening session establishes the historical and conceptual ground of the module by introducing students to some of the major intellectual debates of the great pamphlet war known as the `Revolution Controversy'. It focuses in particular on the rhetoric of revolution - how revolution is `performed'.
Texts: Excerpts from the writings of Price, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Paine, together with critical material.
2. `Stamping the Stony Law to Dust': Radical Blake
This session examines how Blake's dramatic and idiosyncratic 1790s poetry and graphic art intervene in contemporary debates about political, religious and moral freedom. What do these works have to say about the institutional oppression of children, slaves and women?
Texts: The French Revolution; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (selections); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; America.
3. `Pretty Hot in It': Coleridge and Wordsworth - The Radical Years
This session profiles the changing radical selves of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 1790s and their involvement in the radical culture of a tempestuous decade. In what conflicted ways do these poets articulate social protest? What was Wordsworth's experience of revolutionary France? How do these poems locate the individual subject in relation to wider cultural and political forces?
Texts: Coleridge - Selections from Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion and the letters; `Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement'; `France: An Ode'; `Frost at Midnight'; `Fears in Solitude'; Wordsworth - A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; `Adventures on Salisbury Plain', various poems from Lyrical Ballads and selections from The Prelude, Books IX and X.
4. `Hunting the Jacobin Fox': Godwin's Caleb Williams and John Thelwall
This session examines Godwin's famous `jacobin' novel of 1794 as political intervention. It also engages dialogically with a `case study' of the radical orator, political theorist and poet John Thelwall, who became `the most representative figure of state persecution' in the 1790s and was effectively shut down by Pitt's government and driven into `inner exile' in Wales.
Texts: Godwin's Caleb Williams and The `Prefatory Memoir' and selected poems from Thelwall's Poems, Chiefly Written In Retirement, together with co-texts by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
5. Romanticism, History, Historicism I: The Politics of `Tintern Abbey'
Taking Wordsworth's paradigmatic poem as a `test-case', this session introduces students to various historicist readings of `Tintern Abbey', which has become a battle-ground for competing constructions of the Romantics' engagement with, and elision of, history.
Articles by: Marjorie Levinson, Thomas Mc
Brief description
This module examines a range of canonical and non-canonical literature and resonant examples of Romantic-period visual culture (in the form of prints, cartoons and paintings) to get a purchase on the above questions. The module is attuned to current critical and theoretical debates about how we construct the Romantic period, and how the Romantic period sought to constitute itself.
Aims
In ten chronologically arranged sessions, this module seeks to acquaint students with a range of issues focused on the ways in which Romantic authors intervened in - and elided - their turbulent times. Further, it asks them to consider what modes these authors employed to do so, and how they negotiated institutional responses to their dissent? Finally, it sets a theoretical frame for considering the ways in which Romantic literary and political culture can be considered a culture of dialogue, conversation and exchange.
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 7