Week Four: Tuesday, February 2nd

Revolutionary Feminism, from Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: please read the Front Matter, Prologue, and Chapters 1-3

Added 2/1: It looks like the link above is currently non-functioning. Google Books does have a good edition of this available. Feel free to use another edition if you have one. I’ll be working from The Longman Critical Edition.

GoogleBooks: https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=hxwEAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PA31.w.1.0.0

(Oddly, this online edition puts the Dedication and the Advertisement before the 1892 introduction written by Millicent Fawcett, so you have to search around for it.)

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Presentation and assigned  critical reading (Jake Syersak)

Syndy McMillen Conger, “The Power of the Unnamed Youin Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark” in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives (2001)

William Godwin, excerpt from Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (1798)

Erinc Ozdemir, “Hidden Polemic in Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway: A Bakhtinian Reading,” Studies in Romanticism 47 (3) 2008: 321-349. Jake is only asking you to read to 333 but you may choose to finish the article.

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Week Five: Tuesday, February 9th

William Blake

For Songs of Innocence and Experience, you only need to read the selections from our anthology. Full print versions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and “A Song of Liberty” can also be found in the anthology. You’ll see below that I have provided a print version of America and Visions of the Daughters of Albion

 Songs of Innocence and Experience (Please refer to Copy C)

Title-Page Copy T

Image from The First Book of Urizen

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Please refer to Copy A) with Textual Transcription

America (Please refer to Copy A) and Broadview pdf 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Please refer to Copy D)

“Without contraries is no progression” (Plate 3)

“Where man is not nature is barren” (Plate 10)

“Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human heart” (Plate 11)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Plate 14)

Copy B, Plate 20: “Opposition is True”

Critical Reading: 

David Erdman, from “America: New Expanses” (Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic 1970) in Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979)

Joseph Viscomi, from Blake and the Idea of the Book (1983) in Blake’s Poetry and Designs (2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008)

See image of Blake as engraver from Jerusalem

Stephen Behrendt, from Blake in the Nineties (1999) in Blake’s Poetry and Designs (2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008)

Europe, Plate 9

Saree Makdisi, from William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003)in Blake’s Poetry and Designs (2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008)

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Week Six: Tuesday, February 16th

Some Romantic Writing before Lyrical Ballads

Charlotte Smith, all selections from Elegiac Sonnets (Broadview 44-47) and The Emigrants, Book the First

Link to digital resource: Elegiac Sonnets

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (Broadview 409), “Fears in Solitude” and “Frost at Midnight” (Broadview 412)

Joanna Baillie, Introductory Discourse to Plays on the Passions (Broadview 171)

Glossary: blank verse,  lyric (with particular attention paid to to the personal lyric), sonnet, and ode

What is Romanticism?

 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism Preface and Chapter One: “This Is Our High Argument” (pgs. 11-70) [On reserve]

Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (pgs. 1-40) [On reserve]

Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (pgs. 1-29) [On reserve]

Susan Wolfson, “Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?” PMLA 116:5 (2001): 1432-41.

Tilottama Rajan, “Imagining History” PMLA 118:3 (2003): 427-435.

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Tuesday, February 23rd

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

Look over all poems included in the 1798 volume. I’d like you to come to class with a good sense of its overall structure and contents.

Read the “Advertisement” to the 1798 volume and the Preface to the 1802 volume (Appendix A)

Focus on the following poems from the 1798 volume: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” “Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, A True Story,” “Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House,” “Simon Lee,” “We are Seven,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “The Thorn,” “The Dungeon,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Old Man Travelling,” and “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

Look over the table of contents for the 1800 volume and consider the process of selection, addition, re-arrangement and revision. Please read the following poems closely as well as any poems that are mentioned in the critical materials. I’ve added the poems in bold 2/19.

Volume I: (Revised) “The Ancient Mariner, A Poet’s Reverie”

Volume II: “Hart-Leap Well,” “The Brothers, a Pastoral Poem,”  “Lucy Gray,” “The Two April Mornings,” “The Fountain, A Conversation,” “Nutting,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” and “Michael, A Pastoral Poem.”

Coleridge’s, “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (BABL Romanticism)

Critical Reading 

I will expect all of you to begin with the Broadview edition’s introduction, authored by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter.

Tilottama Rajan,  excerpt from The Supplement of Reading: figures of understanding in romantic theory and practice. NY: Cornell University Press, 1990: 136-166.

Jon Mee, excerpts from Conversable Worlds: literature, contention, and community 1762-1830. NY: Oxford University Press, 2011:  1-7; 172-183. The first excerpt is from the Introduction. You do not have to read the section on Cowper from Chapter 4.

Glossary: lyric (with particular attention paid to to the personal and dramatic lyric), ballad, and ode. For a general overview, see prosody, meter, rhyme, stanza, alliteration, assonance, and euphony.

Link to March Schedule