Week One: Tuesday, January 12th 

Course Introduction

A Very Brief Romantic Chronology

A Partial and Highly Prejudiced Critical Chronology of Romanticism

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Week Two: Tuesday, January 19th

Revolutionary Discourse: Selections from Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, Ed. Marilyn Butler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country [Price_RevControversy].  See internet archive for 1790 edition.

Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France [Burke_RevControversy]. See internet archive for 1791 edition.

Mary Wollstonecraft,  from A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  [Wollstonecraft_RevControversy]

Helen Maria Williams,  from Letters from France (10-12)

Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (Broadview 621)

Tom Paine, from The Rights of Man [Paine_RevControversy]

William Godwin, from Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [Godwin_RevControversy]

Samuel Coleridge, Letter to Charles Heath, “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin”, “Fears in Solitude” (Broadview 409). Link to other Coleridge materials (10; 12-13).

Critical Reading

Marilyn Butler, Introduction to Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy [Butler_IntroRevControversy]

Margaret C. Jacob, “Sociability and the international republican conversation” from Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840, Eds., Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Revolutionary Discourse Chronology

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Week Three: Tuesday, January 26th

William Godwin, Caleb Williams

Also all of Appendix A, which includes original manuscript material, accounts of the novel’s composition and Godwin’s essay “Of History and Romance.”

We’ll also be returning to the excerpt from Godwin’s Political Enquiry, as well as a consideration of Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce and Coleridge’s Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin.

Burke, from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (5-8).

See also <The Sublime and the Beautiful>

Link to <William Godwin’s Diary>

Link to Internet Archive’s 1831 Standard Novels edition with illustrations https://archive.org/stream/calebwilliams00godwuoft#page/n9/mode/2up

John Inglett Presentation with Reading: Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH 60.4 (Winter 1993): 939-960. <Handwerk article pdf>

Secondary Critical Reading: Tilottama Rajan, “Judging Justice: Godwin’s Critique of Judgment in Caleb Williams and Other Novels,” Eighteenth Century 51.3 (Fall 2010): 341-362. (full text .pdf available through libs.uga.edu). If you have a chance to read this, I recommend it highly. Part I focuses on Caleb Williams and Political Justice.

Link to February Schedule