Module Identifier EN32520  
Module Title GENDER AND ROMANTICISM  
Academic Year 2003/2004  
Co-ordinator Dr Richard J Marggraf-Turley  
Semester Semester 1  
Course delivery Seminars / Tutorials   20 Hours Seminar. 10 x 2 hour seminar workshops  
Assessment
Assessment TypeAssessment Length/DetailsProportion
Semester Assessment Continuous Assessment: 2 x 2,500 word essays  100%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. 

Learning outcomes

On completion of the module students should typically be able to:
- Locate and discuss issues relating to gender in their cultural and historical context

- Demonstrate an ability to write about literary texts in the light of recent critical debates

- Construct focused and well-structured arguments

- Engage in coherent oral discussion of the material studied

Brief description

This module will explore the writings of the Romantic period in relation to the changing social history of the time, concentrating in particular on issues of gender. During the years which bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries social attitudes and behaviour with regard to gender were in a state of flux, in transience from the emergent feminism of late eighteenth-century radicalism to the rigid polarization of gender roles characteristic of the Victorian epoch. In this option we will be looking at the works of both male and female writers of the period to examine the manner in which such changes found expression in literary texts.

Content

The module will be taught by means of weekly two-hour seminars.

1. Introductiory Session:
General discussion of module and basic issues raised by the study of literature of the Romantic period.

A. Gender and Social Change (2 seminars)

2: A Woman Alone
Text: Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

3: Free Love?

Texts: William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (included with A Short Residence); Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

B. Feminine Genres and their Detractors (4 seminars)

4: Sensibility and the Fictionalization of Feminism
Texts: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria in Mary Wollstonecraft Mary and Maria and Mary Shelley Mathilda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

5: Anti-Sensibility
Text: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

6: Women and the Gothic
Text: Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

7: Mocking the Gothic
Text: Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

C. Male Romanticism (3 seminars)

8: Recasting Masculinity
Texts: Byron Don Juan or some other poem; Coleridge, `Christabel?, `Fears in Solitude?, `This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison?, `To William Wordsworth? and extracts from the Notebooks.

9: Negative Capabilities
Texts: John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997): `Ode to Psyche?, `Ode on Melancholy?, `Ode on Indolence?, `Lamia? and `La Belle Dame Sans Merci?; and extracts from the Letters (provided); Shelley, `Adonais?.   

10: Masculinity Unbound?
Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Matilda in Mary Wollstonecraft Mary and Maria; Mary Shelley, Mathilda, ed. Janet Todd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 6