Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt Office: Knutti 223
Phone: 876-5207, 876-5220, 3119 for messages Office
Hrs.: MWF, 7-11:00 a.m., 1-3:00 p.m.;
Email: Sshurbut@Shepherd.edu TR, appt. only
Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence
Website: http://www.shepherd.edu/ahwirweb/
SYLLABUS
BRITISH ROMANTICS, ENGL 340
The British Romantics course traces the
development of British literature from the poetry of Robert Burns and William
Blake at the end of the 18th Century through the Lake Poets (Dorothy and
William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge), the second generation Romantic writers
(Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron, and Keats), and the great prose writers of the
period (Lamb, Hazlitt, and DeQuincy).
The courses will focus on how these writers' works fit into the
philosophic and aesthetic framework of "high Romantic" literature in
Britain, as well as on their influence on the literature that followed.
TEXTS
AND COURSE REQUIREMENTS: The Norton Anthology of English
Literature: Romantic Period, Vol. 2A, 2000; Percy Shelley’s The Cenci
(Phaeton Press); Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford UP); Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (Penguin);
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (Penguin), Email and WebCt account.
COURSE
CONTENT: PAGE
8-19
Introduction & Webquest
1
8-21/26
The Prelude: Iconoclasts and Rebels
Robert Burns (1759-96) Bonnie
Songs and Serious Satire 99
"Holy Willie's Prayer,"
"To A Mouse," "Tam O'Shanter," "For a' that"
8-28,
9-2/4 William Blake (1757-1827) Revisioning Mythology 35
Two
Letters on Sight and Vision; Songs of Innocence and Experience; "The Marriage
of
Heaven and Hell"; "To Nobodaddy"; "Visions of the Daughters
of Albion";
"Mock
on . . . Voltaire, Rousseau"
9-9/11/16The Lake
Poets
William
(1770-1850) and Dorothy (1771-1855) Wordsworth 219, 383
Alfoxden
and Grasmere Journals,
"Grasmere," "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed"; Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, "Expostulation and Reply," "My Heart Leaps
Up," "Intimations Ode," Lucy Poems, "Resolution and
Independence," "The World Is Too Much with Us," The Prelude
9-18/23
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) "My First Acquaintance with Poets" 513
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834) 416
Biographia Literaria, Lectures
on Shakespeare, "Kubla Khan," "Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,"
"Frost at Midnight"
9-25 Ann Radcliff (1764-1823) and
the Sublime
The
Mysteries of Udolpho, “On the
Supernatural in Poetry,” and Edmund Burke’s A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Idea of the Sublime
*9-30 Test 1
10-2/7
Young
Romantics and Old Iconoclasts
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) 163
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Letters Written during a Short
Residence
in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
William
Godwin (1756-1836) Political
Justice
9/29-10/2
Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence Project : Students are required to attend at
least two AHWIR events (see website at http://www.shepherd.edu/ahwirweb/
)
10-9/14 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) “Beautiful
& Ineffectual Angel” or
Moral Legislator of the World? 698
“Preface to The Poetical Works of
Percy Bysshe Shelley” (MS Reader 377); "A Defence of
Poetry," "Ode to the West Wind," “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” "Ozymandias,"
The Cenci (see http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/PShelley/cencitp.html)
10-16/21 George Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788-1824) Worldly Rogue, A “Strange Mélange” of
Good and Ill 551
Letters
to Leigh Hunt and Percy Shelley; "Written after Swimming from
Sestos to
Abydos"; “She Walks in Beauty”; "They Say that Hope"; Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (563-572, 582-587);
Don Juan, Cantos 1-4; “January 22nd, Missolonghi”
10-23/28 Mary Shelley (1797-1851) Danger Beyond
the Bourne The Mary Shelley Reader
Four
Critical Interpretations of Frankenstein: Visions and Revisions (If you did not read Frankenstein in ENGL 311, you must do so prior to
the Mary Shelley discussion.); “The Bride of Modern Italy”; “The False
Rhyme”; Mathilda; Letters (389-415)
10-30, 11-4 John Keats (1795-1821) Herald for Aesthetes
& Modernists 823
Letters
to George & Thomas Keats, to John Hamilton Reynolds, to Richard Woodhouse,
to
Fanny Brawne, to Percy Shelley, to
Charles Brown
"Epistle
to John Hamilton Reynolds"; Endymion; "La Belle Dame Sans
Merci";
"Eve
of St. Agnes"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "Ode on a Grecian
Urn"; "To Autumn"
"When
I Have Fears"
11-6 Test 2
11-11 Romantic
Periodical Prose: Nascent Modernism
Charles
Lamb
(1775-1834) 494
"Old China," "The Two
Races of Men"
11-13/18
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) 509
"On
Gusto"
Thomas
De Quincey (1785-1858) 718
"Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater"; "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth";
"The
Literature of Knowledge and Power" (From Alexander Pope)
11-20 *Critical Paper Due
11-20, 12-2 New
Directions, Old Values and New
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) Gondal and
BeyondWuthering Heights
12-Test 3
EVALUATION:
Students will write a critical essay on a Romantic work (either
prose or poetry selection of their choice not discussed in class—see Critical
Paper Instructions). Plagiarism
(using another's words or ideas
without crediting or citing) will result in the student's receiving a 0 on the
critical essay and failure for the course. Students are encouraged to keep
up-to-date with reading assignments, as unannounced reading analyses will be a
regular part of the classroom routine. Students
must have a Shepherd University computer account and must log-on to the ENGL
340 Sakai webpage; a grade for Web participation will factor into the daily
grades. Students must attend at least
two Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence events; see schedule at http://www.shepherd.edu/ahwirweb/; grades for residency participation will
factor into daily grades.
The final grade will come from the
average of the following: critical paper (1/5), test #1 (1/5), test #2 (1/5),
reading analyses, WIR participation, & Sakai participation average (1/5), test
#3 (1/5). Student participation in class and in web
discussion is required—the web grade will be determined by the initiative,
quality, and originality of responses, observations,
and comments about the literature we study, the writers, and the period. Make-up work is possible only
if absences are excused and if the instructor is notified in advance of an
absence (email sshurbut@shepherd.edu ); all unexcused work will receive a
0. All make-up work will be
administered on a day set aside at the "end" of the semester. Tardies
are not advised, as they interrupt the discussion, disturbing both professor
and students.