Poetry and History
Convenor: Dr Maddy Callaghan
This module is team-taught by a number of staff from the English department, with
Madeleine Callaghan as the convenor. This is intended to expose you to a range of
approaches and topics via specialists in those areas and offer you a range of teaching
techniques and research interests. The module is designed to move from Eighteenth Century
poetry and its contexts, including poets such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas
Gray, through to the Romantic Period, with William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Helen
Maria Williams, to Victorian poetry, featuring poets such as Elizabeth Barratt Browning and
James Thomson. ‘Poetry and History’ asks students to consider the implications of the nature
of the relationship between poetry and history with reference to cultural and aesthetic
implications.