2016 – 2017
ENGLISH LITERATURE
THIRD YEAR CORE COURSES
(Note: Only Single Honours English Literature
or Scottish Literature
or Joint English and Scottish Literature students
are eligible to take these courses)
26 February 2016
English Literature – Third Year Core courses
SEMESTER ONE
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Early Modern Tragedy
Falling in Love in the Middle Ages
Saints and Sinners
The Canterbury Tales
The Field Full of Folk *
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SEMESTER TWO
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Early Modern Comedy
Place and Space in Early Modern Literature
Romanticism *
The Subject of Poetry: Marvell to Coleridge *
Subjectivity, Modernity and the Novel 1660-1800
* Courses with an asterisk have a Scottish emphasis.
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester One Core Course
Early Modern Tragedy
Tragedy engages with some of the most urgent, as well as enduring, problems that societies
and individuals face. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were one of the great periods
of tragic composition and this course will explore some of its most significant examples. The
course will stress the variety of tragic modes--including revenge drama, ‘heroic’ tragedy,
closet theatre, tragi-comedy and domestic tragedy—as well as the range of theatrical
contexts and staging practices that developed across the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.
In tragic drama, early modern dramatists explored how different societies experienced crisis
and the political and ethical problems this exposed: questions of power and sovereignty,
justice and injustice, mortality and loss, sexual hierarchy and social inequality, political
conformity and resistance, liberty and oppression. The course will consider how dramatists
responded to these key concerns and it will also examine different critical and conceptual
understandings of tragedy.
Seminar Schedule
Week 1:
What is tragedy?
Reading: extracts from George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy and Raymond
Williams, Modern Tragedy (on Learn)
Tragedies of state
Week 2:
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Week 3:
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 1
Week 4:
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam
Household tragedy
Week 5:
Anonymous, Arden of Faversham
Week 6:
Shakespeare, Othello
Tragedy and satire
Week 7:
John Marston, The Malcontent
Week 8:
Essay Completion Week
Week 9:
Thomas Middleton (?), The Revenger’s Tragedy
Power and Sexuality
Week 10:
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Week 11:
John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Primary Texts
English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al (New York:
Norton, 2002)
Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Secondary Reading
Barker, Francis.
The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History.
Manchester: U P, 1993.
Belsey, Catherine.
The Subject of Tragedy : Identity and Difference in
Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985.
Bushnell, Rebecca W.
Bushnell. Rebecca W (ed)
Drakakis, John and
N C Leiber Eds.
Dollimore, Jonathan.
Eagleton, Terry.
Kerrigan, John.
McEachern Claire (ed)
Moretti, Franco.
Wallace, Jennifer.
Williams, Raymond.
Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the
English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1990.
A Companion to Tragedy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Tragedy. Harlow: Longman, 1998.
Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama
of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Brighton:
Harvester, 1984.
Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell,
2003.
Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oxford :
Clarendon Press, 1996.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy.
Cambridge: U P, 2002.
‘The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of
Sovereignty’. In Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the
Sociology of Literary Forms rev.ed. London: Verso, 1988; Rpt
in Shakespearean Tragedy Ed. J Drakakis.
The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy. Cambridge: U P,
2007.
Modern Tragedy (1966; repr London: Hogarth Press, 1992).
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester One Core Course
Falling in Love in the Middle Ages
Bot ever ich have yloved the
As mi liif and so thou me
Sir Orfeo (anon, c. late c13th/early c14th)
‘The Middle Ages’ persist as a source of contemporary and popular cultural fascination
which might, in no small measure, be ascribed to its beguiling literary legacy of love. This
course explores later medieval culture’s diverse imaginative fascination with the nature of
desire, and the experience of desiring, through detailed exploration of some key examples of
erotic and spiritual love-writing from late medieval Britain. Collectively, this material covers
a variety of genres and modes including secular and sacred lyric poetry; dream vision and
allegory; popular and courtly romance; elegy; and ‘mystical’ writing. We will explore our
texts in relation to a European inheritance of erotic discourse and conventions, and
throughout the emphasis will be on close reading and comprehension as we chart the
variety and complexity of the ways in love, desire, and sexuality are articulated.
Seminar Schedule:
Week 1. Introduction: desire in the Middle Ages.
Week 2. Lyrical love I: the troubadours*.
Week 3: Lyrical Love II: Petrarch’s Canzoniere.
Week 4. Supernatural love: Sir Orfeo.
Week 5. Romance I: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Books I - III
Week 6. Romance II: Troilus and Criseyde, Books IV – V
Week 7: Female Voices: Christine de Pizan and Marie de France.*
Week 8. ESSAY WRITING WEEK
Week 9: Romance III: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Week 10: Spiritual Love I: saints’ lives.
Week 11: Spiritual Love II: mystics.*
Primary Texts
•
TEAMS Middle English Text Series: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams [for weeks 4; 1011]
•
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
•
Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Norton Critical edition ed. by Stephen A. Barney (W.W.
Norton & Co, 2006)
•
Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and other works ed. and trans. Mark Musa
(Oxford: World’s Classics, 2008)
•
Other material (asterisked) will be made available on Learn.
Secondary Texts
Detailed reading will be given out in class but the following books should suggest the
nature of the literature and the ideas which we’ll be looking at.
Allen, Peter L. The art of love: amatory fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose
(1992)
Boase, Roger, The origin and meaning of courtly love (1977)
Bogin, Meg. Women Troubadours (1976)
Bruckner, M.T. Songs of the Women Troubadours (1999)
Classen, Albrecht, Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and
Early Modern Literature (2004)
Duncan, Thomas G. ed. Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols 1400-1530 (Penguin,
2000)
Gaunt, Simon and Sarah Kay eds., The troubadours (1999)
Jaeger, Stephen J. Ennobling love: in search of a lost sensibility (1999)
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love (1936)
F.X. Newman, The meaning of courtly love (1969)
O’Donoghue, Bernard, Courtly love tradition (1982)
Paterson, Linda M. The World of the Troubadours (1995)
Paz, Octavio, The Double Flame. Essays on Love and Eroticism (1996)
Pelikan, Jaroslav, Eternal feminines (1990)
Schultz, James A., Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality
(2006)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester One Core Course
Saints and Sinners: Voicing Belief, Doubt, and Dissent in Medieval
English Literature
This course introduces students to a range of medieval literary texts that explore questions
of religious faith and spirituality, and that challenge preconceived and simplistic notions of
the relationship between Church, community, and culture in the period. While the medieval
Church sought to impose a certain degree of dogmatic uniformity, the chosen texts suggest
that it did not always function in a monolithic or rigidly coercive way. Instead, literature
opened up a space in which doubts about doctrine were voiced, and assumptions about
authority and hierarchy were open to question.
The course primarily focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English literature,
and encompasses a wide range of literary forms, each of which explores different aspects of
contemporary faith and spirituality. For instance, amongst the issues raised by the texts is
the centrality of the Virgin Mary in medieval Catholic belief, and the significance of her
perpetual virginity. In their treatment of Mary’s sexuality, medieval texts are alive to the
human – even comic – implications of her virginal state while still revering its theological
import and emotional power. Another area of belief opened up by the texts, and one that
may also seem remote to a modern readership, is the centrality of saints in medieval
religion, and the reciprocal, even companionable relationship between the living and the
dead that a belief in saints necessarily implies. Belief in saints enabled medieval Catholicism
to provide its adherents with a source of comfort and consolation for the anxieties raised by
loss, bereavement, and death. But literature also offered a forum in which writers could
criticise and dissent from received ideas and sources of authority. Ecclesiastical figures found
themselves subject to satirical attack in texts which sought to expose the corruption and
hypocrisy of the Church, and which in some instances even questioned its claims to power
and authority.
Learning Outcomes
Students who have successfully completed this course should have acquired a knowledge of
a number of key Middle English texts, and an understanding of how these works engage with
contemporary religious debates and ideas. By the end of the course, students should also be
familiar with the ways in which both religious scepticism and religious fervour come to be
expressed through literary texts, and how doubts and ideals tend to be articulated in terms
of contemporary social, political and economic models.
Primary Texts
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Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford University Press,
1988)
G. A. Lester, ed. Three Late Medieval Morality Plays: ‘Everyman’, ‘Mankind’ and
‘Mundus et Infans’: A New Mermaids Anthology (Methuen, 2002)
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (D. S. Brewer, 2006)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Seminar Schedule
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Introduction: The Wilton Diptych and The Dream of Innocent III
The Sacred and the Secular: Chaucer, The General Prologue to The
Canterbury Tales
Saints’ Lives: Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale and The Prioress’ Tale
Hagiographical Romance: Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale and The
Clerk’s Tale
Dissenting Women: Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Prologue
The Damned and the Saved: Mankind and Everyman
Anti-Clerical Satire I: Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale
Essay Completion Week
Anti-Clerical Satire II: Chaucer, The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s
Tale
Female Mysticism: The Book of Margery Kempe
Mercy and Justice: (Reading for this week will be in the form of
photocopies of a shorter work – St Erkenwald – and short extracts
from Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and
Jacobus of Voragine’s Golden Legend)
Secondary Reading
Further reading will be suggested at the seminars. But in preparation for the course, as well
as reading as many of the primary texts as possible, you may find the following critical
reading useful.
 Andrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000-1500 (Palgrave Macmillan,
2003)
 John Conley, ed. The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame
Press, 1970)
 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400 – 1580
(Yale University Press, 1992) – ‘Part 1: The Structure of Traditional Religion’, pp. 9376.
 Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press,
1994)
 Dillian Gordon, Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (Yale University Press,
1993)
 Bernard Hamilton, Religion in the Medieval West (Hodder Arnold, 2003)
 Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle
Ages (Oxford University Press, 1988)
 Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and
the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
 R. P. Miller, Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (Oxford University Press, 1977)
 Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale
University Press, 1996)
 Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism
(Oxford University Press, 1994)
 James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2: Reform and Cultural
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
 R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Penguin, 1970)
 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin, 1978)
 Jacobus of Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections, trans. Christopher Stace
(Penguin, 1998)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester One Core Course
The Canterbury Tales
"whoso list [this story] not yheere,
Turne over the leef and chese another tale;
For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale,
Of storial thyng."
The Canterbury Tales is both one of the most accessible and also one of the most challenging
works of medieval literature. It offers a rich and varied story collection, within the
framework of a social and spiritual pilgrimage. The individual stories spread across a wide
spectrum of tone, and of genre, woven by parallel and contrast, theme and narration, into
an intricate and complex whole.
The aim of the course is to explore a range of different individual tales, within the context of
the work as a whole. So it will look at the different narrative kinds and modes used by the
pilgrim storytellers: romances, parodies, farcical fabliaux, comic fables, and moral and
religious tales. Among the themes that will be explored are the recurrent and insistent focus
of the tales on gender relations, as well as on courtly love and romantic desire, and the
strikingly different responses of men and women to the institution of marriage.
But in addition to the tales’ engagement with the social and cultural life of the time, they
also draw attention to themselves as narratives, and in so doing both reflect upon and
question the nature of storytelling itself. This literary self-consciousness – which is both
playful and sophisticated is central to The Canterbury Tales, and will be one of the central
concerns of the course. Moreover, in the collection overall, the social and cultural
significance of fourteenth-century pilgrimage interacts with the literary notion of the quest,
and the ultimate spiritual significance of pilgrimage itself. And throughout the duration of
the course we will examine the different ways in which literary and religious models and
idea overlap and intersect.
Seminar Schedule
Week 1
Introduction
Week 2
The General Prologue
Week 3
Government, Philosophy, Love: The Knight's Tale I
Week 4
The Gods, Death and Destiny: The Knight’s Tale II
Week 5
Farce, Parody and Story-Twinning: The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale
Week 6
Romance, Love, Marriage: The Franklin's Tale
Week 7
Feminism and Antifeminism I: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Week 8
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 9
Feminism and Antifeminism II: The Clerk's Tale, The Merchant’s Tale
Week 10
Narration and Allegory: The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
Week 11
Language and Play: The Nun ’s Priest’s Tale
Reading
The best possible preparation will be to read a selection of The Canterbury Tales so that you
begin to get a sense of their range and the pleasures and challenges they offer. The edition
to use is The Riverside Chaucer, ed LD Benson (1988). It would be a good idea to read the
General Prologue to the tales, and then any or all of the following:
The Franklin's Tale, The Pardoner's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, The Knight's
Tale, The Miller's Tale
If you have read any Chaucer before you will know that it is not really as difficult as it may at
first look: the spelling is more unfamiliar than the language itself. If you feel you need help
then a good approachable book would be David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer's Language
(1983) (there is also a section on language in the Riverside Chaucer).
Reading tales is more important than reading critics at this stage, but if you would like to
begin engaging with various critical ideas and issues try Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales
(Oxford Guides to Chaucer) 1996; The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, edited by Piero
Boitani and Jill Mann, 1986; or Steven Rigby, Chaucer in Context.
Texts:
The Riverside Chaucer ed LD Benson (Oxford, 1988) RP Miller. Chaucer: Sources and
Backgrounds (Oxford, 1977) is also useful.
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester One Core Course
The Field Full of Folk: Medieval Literature and the Imagination of the
World *
The dreamer in Langland’s long 14th century allegorical poem of spiritual pilgrimage, Piers
Plowman opens the poem with a vision of the world. He sees the earth poised between the
Tower of Truth in the East and the Valley of Death in the West:
A fair feeld ful of folk fond I ther bitwene
Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh.
As this image shows, medieval conceptions of the world and of humanity’s operation in that
world, rest on imaginative assumptions which are often very different from those of today.
This course will introduce a varied range of fourteenth and fifteenth century English and
Scottish literary texts: allegory, romance, dream vision, meditation, lyric and drama.
Through these texts it will begin to explore the medieval imaginative models of the physical
and metaphysical world, considering issues such as society, the body, gender, God, love and
death. Visual images and other kinds of writing and commentary will be considered
alongside the literary texts, to develop an understanding of the imaginative world which the
literature both emerged from and helped to shape.
Sample Seminar schedule
1. Introduction: Image, Sign and Allegory: the World as Book
2. The Body:
Chaucer, The Miller’s Prologue and Tale;
Henryson, The Paddock and the Mouse.
3. Society:
The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue;
Lyndsay Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (extracts).
4. God:
(Devotion) Julian of Norwich, Revelations;
Scottish Passion lyrics; York Crucifixion play
5. God:
(Mystery) Cloud of Unknowing;
Henryson, The Preiching of the Swallow
6. Love:
Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls;
Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe; lyrics.
7. Woman:
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale;
Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Marriit Wemen and the Wedo;
Henryson, Garmont of Good Ladies; lyrics
8.
9. Ideas of Reading:
Essay completion week
Extracts supplied
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
10. Animals:
Sir Isumbras;
Henryson Fables; Aberdeen Bestiary
11. Death:
The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale;
Everyman; Dunbar, ‘Lament for the Makaris’;
Henryson, ‘Ressonyng betuix Dethe and Man’
Course text
Chaucer to Spenser: an Anthology, ed Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Other texts
generally available on-line.
Recommended:
Miller, R. P., Ed. Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds. New York, Oxford University Press,
1977.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, ed. The Idea of the Vernacular : An Anthology of Middle English
Literary Theory, 1280-1520. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1
Reading ahead
Full reading suggestions will be made during the course, but in preparation, apart from
reading ahead of any of the primary texts, any of the following critical texts may be useful:
Aers, David. Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology & History. Brighton: Harvester, 1986
Bawcutt, Priscilla and Janet Hadley Williams, eds. A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006
Brown, Peter, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350-c.1500.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2006
Burrow, J. A. Medieval Writers and their Work : Middle English Literature, 1100-1500.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580.
New Haven; London, Yale University Press, 1992
Rigby, S. H. Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996
Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution 1350-1547. Oxford English Literary History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
THIRD YEAR CORE COURSES
SEMESTER TWO
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Early Modern Comedy
Place and Space in Early Modern Literature
Romanticism: Themes, Genres and Contexts *
The Subject of Poetry: Marvell to Coleridge *
Subjectivity, Modernity and the Novel 1660-1800
* Courses with an asterisk have a Scottish emphasis.
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester Two Core Course
Early Modern Comedy
This course focuses on comic writing for the English stage during one of its most exuberantly
creative periods. Beginning with the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and concluding with
some of the most daringly sceptical drama of the Restoration period, the course explores the
varieties of comic theatre developed over the seventeenth century, including festive
comedy, the carnivalesque, fable, city comedy, and different modes of satire. In doing so, it
examines the comic engagement with a range of moral, social and political debates and
conflicts. It also reads the plays in the light of theories and critical accounts of the purposes
and workings of comedy, as well as in the context of the very different social and staging
conditions obtaining at either end of the century.
Syllabus
Week 1
Introduction: What's funny about comedy?
Week 2
Shakespeare, As You Like It
Week 3
Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday
Week 4
Jonson, Volpone
Week 5
Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Week 6
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
Week 7
Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Week 8
Etherege, The Man of Mode
Week 9
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 10
Behn, The Rover
Week 11
Wycherley, The Country Wife
Week 12
Congreve, Love for Love
Reading List
Compulsory
William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Oxford)
David Bevington, gen. ed. English Renaissance Drama: an Anthology (Norton)
Aphra Behn, The Rover (New Mermaids)
Gamini Salgado, ed. Three Restoration Comedies (Penguin)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Recommended
Matthew Bevis, Comedy (OUP)
Simon Critchley, On Humour (Routledge)
Dustin Griffin, Satire: a Critical Reintroduction (UP Kentucky)
Penny Gay, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies (CUP)
Alexander Leggatt, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (CUP)
R. W. Maslen, Shakespeare and Comedy (Thomson)
Alexander Leggatt, Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy (MUP)
Rick Bowers, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Ashgate)
Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (CUP)
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton)
Richard Bevis, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660-1789 (Longman)
Deborah Payne Fisk, The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (CUP)
Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 (CUP)
Steven Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740 (CUP)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester Two Core Course
Place and Space in Early Modern Literature
This course explores the many ways in which writers in the early modern period imagined,
narrated and created place. Reading across fiction, drama and poetry, it addresses a series of
linked questions. How does literature articulate the relationship between people and their
environment? How does it trace connections between landscape and personal, family and
national histories? What does it make of the contrast between settlement and mobility? To
what ends does it imagine impossible or futuristic places? In addressing these questions, the
course will examine differing literary perspectives on place, as well as their relationship to
other forms of landscape representation such as cartography and painting. It will also draw
on relevant historical context and theories of place and space to help focus students'
attention on the multitude of ways in which literature works topopoetically - as the writing
of place, space and mobility.
Syllabus
Early Modern Topographies:
Week 1
Introduction: Writing Space and Place
Week 2
Visit to NLS Map library
Family Trees:
Week 3
Jonson, 'To Penshurst'; Lanier, 'The Description of Cookham'; Carew,
'To Saxham'; Waller, 'At Penshurst'
Week 4
Marvell, The Mower poems, 'The Garden', 'Upon Appleton House';
Philips, 'Upon the Graving of her Name upon a Tree'
Political Prospects:
Week 5
Milton, Comus; Denham, 'Cooper's Hill'
Week 6
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
Week 7
Waller, 'Upon his Majesty's Repairing of Paul's'; 'On St James's Park, as
Lately Improved by His Majesty'; Rochester, 'A Ramble in St James's
Park'
On the Move:
Week 8.
Jonson, The New Inn
Week 9
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 10
Brome, A Jovial Crew
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
The Good Place?
Week 11
More, Utopia
Week 12
Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World,
'A Description of an Island'
Reading List
Compulsory
Robert Cumming, ed. Seventeenth Century Poetry: an Annotated Anthology (Blackwell)
Ben Jonson, The New Inn (Revels)
Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew (Arden)
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin)
Recommended
Steven Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740 (CUP)
Gregory Claeys, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (CUP)
Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama (CUP)
Susan Bennett, ed., Performing Environments (Palgrave)
Tim Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance (Ashgate)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (OUP)
James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Blackwell)
Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled (U Chicago Press)
Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (CUP)
Tim Cresswell, Place: a Short Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell)
Jon Anderson, Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (Routledge)
Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism (OUP)
Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, ed., Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in
Early Modern Britain (CUP)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester Two Core Course
Romanticism: Themes, Genres and Contexts *
This course provides students with a broad, varied and yet detailed exploration of British
Romantic literature by examining a number of its distinctive genres addressed related
themes and contexts. In particular, it will examine the way in which formal innovation was a
response to a series of historical upheavals: the French Revolution (1789–94), the two
decades of war that it initiated (1793–1815), and the socially and politically volatile peace
that followed.
Week 1.
Introduction. Romanticism and Revolution.
Selections from: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790); Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791); and Helen Maria Williams,
Letters Written in France (1790).
Week 2.
Apocalypse and the Sublime
Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (1759);
Anna Barbauld, ‘Epistle to Wilberforce’ (1792) and Eighteen Hundred and
Eleven (1812);
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1794).
Week 3.
Blank-verse autobiography
Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants (1793);
William Wordsworth, from The Prelude (1805).
Week 4.
The Modern Ballad
S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Anceynt Marinere’ and William Wordsworth,
‘The Thorn’ from Lyrical Ballads (1798);
Walter Scott, ballads from The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3).
Week 5.
The Ode
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode’ (1807); S.T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’
(1817); P.B. Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817).
Week 6.
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
Week 7.
The Domestic Novel
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Week 8.
The Historical Novel
Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817)
Week 9.
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 10:
Byron
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third (1816); ‘Dedication’ to
Don Juan (1818, 1832)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Week 11:
Variations on the Gothic I
Byron, Manfred (1817); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818).
Week 12:
Variations on the Gothic II
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824).
Reading List
Compulsory Primary Texts:
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley and Claire Lamont (Oxford World’s
Classics, 2004).
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Ian Duncan
(Oxford World’s Classics, 2010).
Walter Scott, Rob Roy, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. The 1818 text, ed. Marilyn Butler
(Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).
Duncan Wu, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 4th edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012.
This is the set text for the poetry on the course.
Any other texts (from Scott’s Minstrelsy, for example) will be supplied on Learn.
Recommended Reading:
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953)
----, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1973)
John Barrell, 'The Uses of Dorothy: 'The Language of the Sense' in 'Tintern Abbey,''
Wordsworth: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. J. Williams (1993)
Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970)
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background
1760-1830 (1981)
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic
Historicism (1998)
----, Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984)
Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (2000)
E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (1995)
Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (1993)
----, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1990)
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, 1984)
David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009)
Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007)
James Engell, 'Coleridge and German Idealism: First Postulates, Final Causes,' The Coleridge
Connection, eds. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (1990)
Kelvin Everest and Alison Yarrington, eds. Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism
(1993)
Mary Favret and Nicola Watson, eds., At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural,
Feminist, and Materialist Criticism (1994)
Karen Fang, 'Empire, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb's Consumer Imagination,' SEL: Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 43.4 (2003): 815-43.
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of
Individuation (1992)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Jack Fruchtman, 'The Æsthetics of Terror: Burke's Sublime and Helen Maria Williams's Vision
of Anti-Eden' 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 6
(2001): 211-31
Geoffrey Hartman, 'Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,' Beyond Formalism: Literary
Essays 1958-1971 (New Haven, 1970), 298-310.
----, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (1964)
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)
Arthur O. Lovejoy, 'On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,' Publications of the Modern
Languages Association of America 39 (1924): 229-53
Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983)
Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (1994)
Uttara Natarajan, 'The Veil of Familiarity: Romantic Philosophy and the Familiar Essay,'
Studies in Romanticism 42.1 (2003): 27-44
Michael O'Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997)
Alan Rauch, 'The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,' Studies in
Romanticism, 34.2 (1995): 227-53
Andrew Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (2005)
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1963)
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester Two Core Course
The Subject of Poetry: Marvell to Coleridge *
This course is about the subject of poetry in two senses: firstly it offers a general survey of
the themes of poetry in the eighteenth century, and secondly it explores changes in the ‘I’ of
poetry. This includes such topics as the nature of interiority, the way the poetic voice
speculates on the form and function of poetry, the visual scope of the poetic narrative. The
poems chosen will raise questions about what readers in the period might assume about the
role of literature and how these particular texts confirm or challenge such assumptions. By
reading different verse forms and styles students will be made aware of the ways in which
techniques such as rhyme, rhythm, metre and diction produce different modes of poetic
voice. Class discussion will centre on close readings of the poems themselves. Autonomous
Learning Groups will be used for the students to explore the historical and cultural
‘background’ of the periods through guided reading.
This course will take students through a range of different poetic forms: epistles, country
House poems, landscape Poems, Elegy, ‘Conversation’ poems’. It will allow students to trace,
through the changing poetic voice, ideas about class, gender, property, religion, nationalism
and the mind.
Seminar Schedule
Week 1
Introductory class;
some definitions and preparatory reading.
Week 2
Andrew Marvell, ‘Appleton House’ [in Norton Anthology]
Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Burlington’ *
Week 3
Alexander Pope, ‘Windsor Forest’*
Mary Collier, ‘The Woman's Labour’ *
Week 4
James Thomson, ‘Spring’ *
Week 5
Thomas Gray ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ * and ‘The Bard’ *,
Macpherson ‘Fragments of Ancient Poetry’ *
Week 6
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
Week 7
Robert Burns, ‘Verse Epistles’
Week 8
Class on printing and publication of the poems
(class will be held at National Library)
Week 9
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 10
Mary Robinson. ‘The Poet’s Garret’,
Anna Seward, ‘Colebrook Dale’,
Margaret Chalmers, ‘The Rose of the Rock’
Week 11
William Cowper, ‘The Castaway’ *,
Christopher Smart, ‘On a bed of Guernsey Lilies’ *,
Anna Seward, ‘To the Poppy’
Samuel Johnson, ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ *,
Matthew Prior, ‘On a Pretty Madwoman’ *
Week 12
S T Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ [in Norton Anthology]
Ambrose Phillips, ‘Winter Piece’ *
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
READING
Course Anthology
The main course text is Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Fairer and
Gerrard, 2nd edition (Blackwell, 2008) and students are advised to purchase a copy. *
Asterisked texts are to be found there. Other texts will be available for download on LEARN.
Further reading
Doody, Margaret Anne. The Daring Muse. Augustan Poetry Reconsidered. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Dowling, William. The Epistolary Moment: the Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse
Epistle, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991
Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson
to Wordsworth Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Goodman, Kevis, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of
History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Goodridge, Thomas, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Hobsbaum, Philip. Metre, rhythm, and verse form. London: Routledge, 1996.
Kaul, Suvir Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long 18th Century
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Rothstein, Eric, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry London: Routledge, 1981
Sambrook, James The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English
Literature 1700-1789 London: Longman, 1993
Sitter, John. The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001
Woodman, Thomas (ed.), Early Romantics; Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to
Wordsworth Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998
McGann, Jerome The Poetics of Sensibility: a Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
English Literature Third Year
Semester Two Core Course
Subjectivity, Modernity and the Novel 1660-1800
This course is designed to explore the issues surrounding the emergence of 'the novel' as a
distinct form in Britain in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will trace the
emergence of the oppositions between the fictive and the historical as two realms with their
own distinct claims to 'truth', and between 'realism' and 'romance' as two different types of
fiction, as the grounding conditions for the emergence of the novel. We will also be
considering the political and religious values at stake in these oppositions, by relating prose
fiction to the political and economic developments of the period.
Syllabus:
Week 1.
Week 2.
Week 3.
Week 4.
Week 5.
Week 6.
Week 7.
Week 8.
Week 9.
Week 10.
Week 11.
Week 12.
Introduction
Anon., The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and
Adversities (1554) and Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler (1626)
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)
Aphra Behn, 'Oroonoko' , 'The Fair Jilt' and 'The History of the Nun'
(all 1688)
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)
ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy vols. I - VI
(1759-1761)
Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy vols. VII - IX
(1765-1767)
Frances Burney, Evelina (1776)
Reading List
Compulsory:
The Swindler and Lazarillo de Tormes: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels. Trans. Michael Alpert.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko and Other Writings. Ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: World's Classics,
2009.
Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ed. W. Owens. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1987.
Burney, Frances. Evelina. Ed. Edward A. Bloom. Oxford: World's Classics, 1982.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Ed. David Blewett. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. Ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies. Oxford: World's Classics, 1980.
Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Ed. Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford:
World's Classics, 1983.
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English Literature – Third Year Core courses
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Ed. Thomas Keymer. Oxford: World's Classics, 2001.
Recommended:
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. O.U.P. 1987
Backscheider, Paula R. A Being More Intense: a study of the prose works of Bunyan, Swift,
and Defoe. New York: AMS Press, 1984
Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Woman's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: OUP,
1992
Bell, Ian. Defoe's Fiction. London: Croon Helm, 1985
Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in EighteenthCentury England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
Boardman, Michael. Defoe and the Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1983
Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986
Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983
Hatfield, Glen. Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968
Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method. Baltimore, 1966.
----. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 1990
Kahn, Madelaine. Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century
English Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Roger Woolhouse.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600 - 1740. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1987.
Richetti, John. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739. Oxford:
OUP, 1969
----. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987
----. The English Novel in History, 1700'1780. London: Routledge, 1999.
Sim, Stewart. Negotiations with Paradox: narrative practice and narrative form in Bunyan
and Defoe. 1990
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Imagining A Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century
England.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
Wright, Andrew. Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965.
24