Romanticism Module, Spring 2003

This page contains the assignments from the Romanticism module "Revolution and Romanticism" with links to the online readings and to supporting materials.

First day: introductions and course outline.

• "The Romantics and Their Contemporaries" (anthology 2)
  • To see a sampling of recent critical work on Romanticism indexed by topic, you can look at the Romantic Circles Praxis series.

In class today, I will give a broad introduction to Romanticism and explain how the texts we will read fit into the big picture. I will leave time for questions about the reading, so prepare one or two of those in advance.

Also, please go to the class discussion board and write a solid paragraph or two introducing yourself to the class. Aside from the obvious introductory function of this assignment, it also ensures that we deal with any technical problems before the responses begin.

• All readings from "Perspectives: The Rights of Man and the Revolution Controversy" (anthology 56)
  • For a more directly historical perspective on the French Revolution, you can also see Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, a collaboration of the Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) and American Social History Project (City University of New York).

Group I Response: Use your response to discuss one or more rhetorical or metaphorical devices you see more than one writer employing in the readings. In other words, try to get at the literary side of these explicitly political texts.

• William Wordsworth, Preface (anthology 356), "The Thorn" (anthology 343), and "Note to the Thorn" (anthology 348) from Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800)
  • The Lyrical Ballads Bicentenary Project is an excellent scholarly site. A lot of Wordsworthian information of varying quality dots the Internet; the best and most authoritative starting point is probably the Wordsworth section of the Voice of the Shuttle Romanticism page. That page has a section for Coleridge as well, but you can also start with Marjorie A. Tiefert's Coleridge Archive.

Group II Response: Discuss either a) Wordsworth's use of multiple voices in "The Thorn" or b) something about the poem's relation to the ideas Wordsworth sets out in his famous Preface.

• Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (352) and "Old Man Travelling" (351) from Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Group III Response: Use the response to focus on a short passage (no more than ten lines) of either poem. Take a stab, at least, at using that bit of text to point to a broader point about the poem or Wordsworth's approach more generally.

• Selections from M.H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric" (1965) and Marjorie Levinson, "Insight and Oversight: Reading 'Tintern Abbey'" (1986), handout.

Group IV Response: Choose a point of comparison between Abrams and Levinson that lets you discuss not only their different readings of Wordsworth but also the way they value different things when they examine poetry.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1817 version, anthology 528) and the 1798 excerpt for comparison (anthology 526) from Lyrical Ballads

Group V Response: This one is optional, in that you can choose to make it an "open response" if you like. Consider the place of this poem in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, in which it opened the volume that "Tintern Abbey" closed, with poems such as "The Thorn" in between. What kind of progression might the volume have been constructing?

• Anna Letitia Barbauld, "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" (1812, anthology 37) and the excerpt from Croker's review (anthology 45)
  • Two academic sites have general as well as text-specific information about Barbauld: The Anna Laetitia Barbauld Web Site and Anna Letitia Barbauld Prose Works

Group VI Response: Discuss any way in which this poem represents a departure from what you have seen of Lyrical Ballads.

• John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816) and companion readings (anthology 854), "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" (1817, anthology 864)

  • In spite of its preposterously overstated title, John Keats: A Comprehensive Study of His Life and Work is in fact an interesting and useful general site with some primary texts. Also good are a British Library exhibition on Keats and the site of Rome's Keats-Shelley House.

Group I Response: open response.

• Percy Bysshe Shelley, from A Defence of Poetry (1821, anthology 800)
  • See again the Keats-Shelley House. None of the amateur sites online can capture Shelley as well as his own words in Stuart Curran's e-text of the notes to Queen Mab.

Group II Response: open response.

• Shelley, "Mont Blanc" (1817, anthology 754) and "Sonnet: England in 1819" (1819, anthology 761)

Group III Response: open response.

PAPER PROSPECTUS DUE
FOR STUDENTS WRITING PAPERS

• George Gordon, Lord Byron, Dedication (1819, anthology 668), Canto I (1819, anthology 672) and excerpt from Canto VII (1823, anthology 741) of Don Juan and "Prometheus" (1816, Frankenstein edition 286).
  • The companion to the Keats site of the same crazy title: Byron: A Comprehensive Study of His Life and Work. Aside from that site, there is remarkably little useful online information about Byron.

Group IV Response: open response.

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818): Wolfson's introduction, the Preface, and Volume I.
  • This novel has attracted a lot of attention on the Net. Georgetown professor Martin Irvine's page is a good starting point.

Group V Response: open response.

• Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume II

Group VI Response: open response.

• Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume III

Group I Response: Looking back at the first two sets of responses on Frankenstein, continue a line of thinking that someone else introduced. What happens in the last volume to develop or transform an element of the text we noticed earlier?

FIRST EXAM/PAPER DATE