Romanticism
Dr Wim Van Mierlo

Course description

What is Romanticism? The British Romantic poets did not constitute a movement or a school, yet in spite of differences between them literary history has recognized in the work of the poets working from ca. 1798 to 1850 a number of corresponding characteristics, affiliations and preoccupations. One may well speak of a Romantic mentalité . The object of this course is to study some of these preoccupations, of an aesthetic as well a political nature, such as Romantic moments or places, the sublime, intellectual beauty, visionary power, nationalism, revolution, and so on, against their historical and literary-historical context. Besides the canonical “six” (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron), we will read a number works by “minor” figures and women poets from the period.

Reading List
Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-Rom. Ed. Duncan Wu. 2 nd Edition. Basingstoke: Blackwells, 2000. (ISBN 0631222693)

 

Syllabus

4 Oct.

Romantic Moments

William Wordsworth, “Daffodils” (383)

Dorothy Wordsworth, from Grasmere Journals (433-35)

William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper” (63), “Introduction” (71) , “The Sick Rose” (76), “The Tyger” (77)

S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Kahn” (522-4)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (859-61)

John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy” 1062), "To Autumn" (1080)

 

11 Oct.

Romantic Places

William Blake, “London” (79)

William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” (374), “London 1802” (374), “Tintern Abbey” (265-69)

Dorothy Wordsworth, “A Cottage in Grasmere Vale” (435-36)

James Leigh Hunt, “To Hampstead” (621)

 

18 Oct.

The Sublime and Intellectual Beauty I

Burke, On the Sublime (4-8)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ”A Summer's Evening Mediation” (19)

Percy Bysche Shelley, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (841-43), “Mont Blanc”, from A Defence of Poetry (944-56)

William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (375-80); from Thirteen-Book Prelude (401-405)

S.T. Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode” (2 versions, 495-504; 507-11), “The Eolian Harp” (549-50), “Frost at Midnight” (462-65); from Biographia Litteraria (525-7); “Pains of Sleep” (524-5)

Thomas de Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium Eater (630-8)

 

25 Oct.

The Sublime and Intellectual Beauty II

see above

 

8 Nov.

Romantic Women

Charlotte Smith (35-6)

Charlotte Dacre (442-3)

Mary Tighe (443-6)

Felicia Dorothea Hemans (990-1004)

 

15 Nov.

Politics and Revolution

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Rights of Women (25-6)

George Dyer, from The Complaints of the Poor People of England (45)

Thomas Paine (14-7)

Mary Wollstonecraft (140-5)

William Godwin, from Political Justice (48-50)

William Wordsworth, from The Thirteen-Book Prelude (394-9)

22 Nov.

The Lyrical Ballads I

(189-269)

 

29 Nov.

The Lyrical Ballads II

324-9, 332-56, 357-66) (see also Lyrical Ballads: Online Scholarly Edition

 

6 Dec.

John Keats

Hyperion (1022-41)

 

13 Dec.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Alastor (824-41); Prometheus Unbound (864-930)

 

20 Dec.

Lord Byron

from Don Juan (755-6)

Manfred (718-51)

 

Pages created 29 September 2004, Wim Van Mierlo