Romantic Literature

ENG 4023.001

Fall 2009

Dr. Lopez

MWF 11:00-11:50 HSS 2.02.10

Office Hours: MW 12:00-1:00 and M 4:15-5:15 MB 2.478

Debbielopez8@netzero.com

Content and Goals:

Students will have an opportunity to survey the British Romantic age’s poetry, prose, and
ambient cultural world. The four novels read will include two by Austen, Shelley’s Frankenstein,
and Walpole’s Gothic tale, The Castle of Otranto. In addition to reading the texts closely, we will
study the works in relation to their historical and ideological contexts. Topics explored include,
for example—

 Aesthetic constructs such as the Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Picturesque

 The Gothic

 Nature

 The Apocalyptic Imagination

 Gender and Romanticism

 Women’s Rights

 Concepts of revolution

 Abolition and the slave trade

 Artistic self-portraits with regard to Romantic ideology

 Critical and theoretical debates regarding Romanticism(s)

Texts: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (8th ed.); Austen, Pride and Prejudice and
Northanger Abbey; Shelley, Frankenstein (Bedford); Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford)
Requirements: 20% class participation; 20% class report; 40% midterm and final exams; 20%
one 8-10 page researched paper (MLA format)

8/26 Introduction

8/28—9/2 The Castle of Otranto

9/4-9/14 Northanger Abbey

9/16 Norton, Wollstonecraft’s own introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

9/18-9/28 Pride and Prejudice

9/30 Robinson, “January, 1795,” “London’s Sunday Morning,” and “The Poor Singing Dame”

10/2 Burns, “To a Mouse” and “Tam o’ Shanter”

10/5 Blake, “There is No Natural Religion” [a & b], and from Songs of Innocence
—“Introduction” and “Holy Thursday”

10/7 Blake, from Songs of Innocence: “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney Sweeper”; and
from Songs of Experience: “Introduction”

10/9 Blake, from Songs of Experience: “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Garden
of Love,” and “The Sick Rose”

10/12 Blake, “The Tyger” and “London”

10/14 Midterm exam (matching and identification of quotes within contexts)

10/16 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

10/19 “ “Michael”

10/21 “ “I Wandered lonely as a cloud,” “We are Seven,” and “The Thorn”

10/23 “ “Tintern Abbey” and “London, 1802”

10/26 Coleridge, “This Lime-Tree Bower,” “Frost at Midnight,” and “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner

10-/28-10/30 “ “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan”

11/2 “ “Dejection: An Ode”; Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”

11/4 Keats, “Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

11/6 “ “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

11/9 Paper Due (on any work assigned before this date); Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”
11/11 Byron, Don Juan: Fragment and Canto 1

11/13 P.B. Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “To a Sky-Lark”

11/16 Discussion of papers

11/18 Landon, “The Proud Ladye,” “Love’s Last Lesson,” and “Revenge”

11/20-12/2 Frankenstein

12/4 Review