TEXTS:

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
 

DESCRIPTION:

From the Romantic Movement to the Modern Period: that means something like from 1798 to 1939, according to tradition. The former date marks the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the latter date marks the publication of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the death of William Butler Yeats. These literary events, and the ones falling in between, occur against a backdrop of political dates which were momentous for Britain: 1648 (the execution of
Charles I), 1688 (the Glorious Revolution), 1789 (the French Revolution), 1799-1815 (Napoleon's empire), 1801 (the Act of Union), 1837-1901 (the reign of Victoria), 1838 (the People's Charter), 1832, 1867, 1884-85 (the Reform Bills), 1899-1902 (the Boer War), 1914-1918 (WW I), 1939-45 (WW II). Another and equally important historical backdrop for our reading could be termed British intellectual or social history: the Enlightenment, particularly Locke; the rise of industrialism and capitalism; technological revolutions ushered in by the steam ship, the railroad, the telegraph, the airplane, and modern machines of war; the expansion of political and economic empire; the decline of religious sentiment; the institution of universal education; the debate of the Woman Question; the broadening of
the franchise; the rise of nationalism and ideology; and the confrontation between British and non-Western cultures. I will try to draw connections with these backgrounds while we undertake our main task: reading the literature.

Procedures and Requirements:

The reading load for the course is necessarily stiff, so count on reading about twenty pages for each class. (The reading load during our examination of Frankenstein and A Portrait will be heavier, as is the case with novels.) NOTE: All of the introductions in the anthology sections and to the assigned authors and works are required reading; you will be responsible for that material on tests. The grade will be based on the following measures:

Quizzes    15%
Midterm   25%
Essay      25%
Final        35%
              100%

The final grade may, in borderline cases, be influenced by good attendance and regular participation. Quizzes, some of them possibly unannounced, will be reading quizzes (testing merely if you have read the assignment carefully) and cannot be made up if missed. The midterm can be made up only in the event of near-death experiences. The essay will be a 4-6 page non-research paper on a topic tailored to your interests.

Typical Readings:

Blake: "Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Coleridge: "Kubla Khan," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 

Byron: Manfred

Percy Shelley: "Mont Blanc," "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," "Ode to the West Wind," "Ozymandias" Keats: "On First Looking into Champman's Homer," "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Carlyle: excerpt from Sartor Resartus

Arnold: excerpts from "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and "Culture and Anarchy;"  "Dover Beach"

Tennyson: "The Kraken," "The Lady of Shalott," "Ulysses," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," excerpt from "In Memoriam A.H.H."

Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto"

Hopkins: poems

Hardy: poems

Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Yeats:  poems

Eliot, "The Waste Land"

Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist

Virginia Woolf: selections

Auden: poems

Dylan Thomas: poems

Heaney: poems