Course description
The spirit of the age’ was, it seemed to John Stuart Mill, writing in the Examiner in 1831, a ‘novel expression’: ‘I do not believe it is to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity.’ It was a term coined, he suggests, by people who believed that they lived in times ‘distinguished in a very remarkable manner from the times which preceded them.’ This Masters course is built on the belief that what Mill is describing here is the condition of modernity, and that, just as Mill suggests, it is a condition that had its origin in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The course will examine the Romantic ‘spirit of the age’ as marking a period in which literature became self-consciously modern, and, despite vigorous attempts to combat it, modernity has been the aspiration or the predicament of writers ever since. This course will give students an opportunity to focus on the Romantic period, or, if they prefer, to trace the manner in which Romantic modernity was re-articulated by the successors of the Romantics, the Victorians of the later nineteenth century, and by the Modernists of the early decades of the twentieth century.
Romantic modernity takes many forms. It may be a purely literary manner, signalled by the ambition that so many of the writers of the period shared to write things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. This course will explore the new kinds of writing that emerged in the Romantic period.
Romantic modernity was a product of dramatic changes in literary production; a startling increase in the number of books published, in the number of their readers, and a large increase in the breadth of the social spectrum from which both writers and readers came. Most dramatically, by 1800 women had made the novel so completely their own that Walter Scott’s attempt to reclaim the novel for masculinity seemed a startling innovation.
It was a product too of political changes of unprecedented rapidity. In the six years between 1789 and 1795 France underwent a process of political change that would have been rapid had it extended over a century. It must have seemed that history had unaccountably speeded up. The deeply divided responses of British writers to events in France, and to Britain’s counter-revolutionary stance, played an important part in shaping the literary output of both Romantic generations.
Britain, too, was changing. The United Kingdom did not come into existence until 1801, when Ireland joined the Union, and the relationship between the ‘four nations’ was just as often marked by internal rivalry as by a shared ‘British’ identity. Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Mary Tighe, Lady Morgan and many other writers came out of Ireland. Scotland was still more important. Walter Scott’s status as the pre-eminent writer of the age was challenged only by Byron, who was himself, or so he claimed, ‘half a Scot’. There were other writers – Burns, James Hogg, Joanna Baillie – and out of Scotland, too, came the important periodicals of the age, the Edinburgh, the leading review, and Blackwood’s, so clearly the leading magazine that it was known simply as ‘Maga’.
Turnpike roads and an increase of wealth made travel through Britain more possible: William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and De Quincey all made tours into Scotland. As the sphere of British power and influence expanded, many travelled further afield, whether by land and sea like Byron, or in their imaginations, like Ann Radcliffe, Southey, Hemans, and Austen, who so carefully mapped the long voyages of her sailor brothers. In an era when Britain came to rule over 26% of the world’s population, Romantic literature engaged deeply with questions of imperial power at a global as well as a local level, particularly evident in the currency of oriental and exotic topics and settings, which also provided a powerful imaginative legacy for Victorian writers.
All these are features of what we call Romantic modernity, and all of them will be explored in a course which takes as its focus this exciting and pivotal period of English literature. By conveying a sense of the current state of the field, the course programme should prove particularly useful to those considering doctoral study.
Course Programme
The Masters is a one-year course, taught over three terms. (Part-time students spread the course over two years.) In the first and second terms (known in Glasgow as ‘Martinmas’ and ‘Candlemas’ terms), students will take two core seminar courses, one per term, taught by different combinations of staff. These courses are designed to give students an overview of ongoing debates about the period, and to invite them to interrogate concepts of periodicity and canonicity. An important part of these courses are the student led seminars in which students engage in specific investigations of their own on selected themes, authors and texts from the period. The discussion from these student led seminars provide a key point of departure for the faculty led seminars of the following week, initiating students into the collaborative and self-directed nature of postgraduate inquiry. Much of the reading required for these classes will be either included in course books, distributed to students at the beginning of each term, or provided in handouts distributed the week before each seminar. Other suggested titles will all be in the University Library and Bookshop.
In each of the first two terms, students will also take two seminar modules on special subjects in the period. These topic courses reflect the current research interests of the faculty and are designed to introduce students to a range of more detailed issues and subjects in the period. Throughout the year, we use an electronic forum to continue discussions outside of the classroom and to explore other varieties of intellectual collaboration and exchange.
As part of their assessment for the Masters, students are required to submit four essays during the first two terms that address issues raised in both the core and topic courses. In the third term (‘Whitsun’), students work under the supervision of an individual tutor to prepare for the final dissertation: an extended essay between 10,000 and 15,000 words on an approved subject of the student’s own devising, which is to be written up independently over the summer and submitted at the end of the year.
plate from Dore's The Ancient Mariner
Core Courses
The first core course, Constructing the Period, formally initiates students into the process of periodizing, historicizing, and criticizingwhat we have chosen to call ‘Romantic Modernity’. The second, Kinds of Writing/Kinds of Reading, examines the main genres of the Romantic period, the various ways they were produced and consumed, and considers the pressure they exerted on subsequent forms of reading and writing.
Seminars offered as part of the core course programme include: ‘Romantic Canons’; ‘William Blake: Printing Word and Image’; ‘Literature and Science’; ‘Romantic Modernity’; ‘Romantic Womean Poets’; ‘Romantic Visual Culture’; ‘Reviews and Magazines of the Nineteenth Century’ and ‘Romantic Afterlives’.
Topic Courses
Topic courses offered may include:
Nationalism and Reading Publics, Richard Cronin:
This course will consider the odd coincidence that at precisely the same time that Napoleon gave the idea of the nation, Britain, a hitherto unprecedented potency, the reading public fragmented into a number of disparate groups. Hence, at a time when writers felt an unusual pressure to address the nation, a national language was found to be wanting. The key secondary texts will be Linda Colley’s Britons and Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. The texts studied will include works by Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Cobbett, Shelley, Hemans and Carlyle.
Constructing Scotland, Dorothy McMillan:
The course will look at Scotland’s presentation of itself (both Lowlands and Highlands) from the Union to 1830 and at the sometimes competing or contradictory versions of the country which derive from English and other travellers. The texts studied will cover actual travel writing but will also encompass the direct and oblique representations of fiction, drama and poetry. Writers will include Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, the Wordsworths, Keats and William Cobbett with a backward look at Defoe and a glance forward to Queen Victoria. Fiction will include works by Elizabeth Hamilton, Scott, Jane Porter, Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Joanna Baillie. Macpherson’s Ossian, Burns and other less well known Scottish poets will also be considered.
Ford Madox Brown, The Finding of Juan By Haidee Cultures of Reading, Nicola Trott:
This topic course is concerned with the ways in which ‘reader response’ was generated and constructed in the 1790s and early 1800s, in both literary works and reviews and articles. One focus will be on the surprising and often formally creative interrelations of criticism and literature; another will be on those genres which proved most testing to the readers and critics of the period: the gothic romance, jacobin fiction, or ‘peasant’ poetry.
Romantic Orientalism, Nigel Leask:
How did British poets, novelists and essayists imagine ‘the orient’ at a time when large swathes of Asia were coming under British colonial domination? How did literary orientalism contribute to the consolidation of British imperial culture? More important from a literary perspective, did orientalism play as large a role in the construction of canonical Romanticism as has been claimed by some scholars, or did it remain peripheral, tarred by its associations with popular culture and commercialism? In these seminars we’ll study the impact of the new wave of oriental scholarship initiated by Sir William Jones from the 1780’s, as well as the spate of Asian travel accounts linked to colonial expansion, on the older ‘dreamlike’ orient associated with ‘Arabian Nights’ and the 18th Century Oriental Tale. We’ll consider a wide range of writings by Southey, Coleridge, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Morgan, Scott, Byron, Moore, Shelley, Keats, De Quincey, as well as travel accounts by Belzoni, Maria Graham and Reginald Heber. We’ll also think about the relationship of orientalism to cognate discourses such as hellenism and gothic, the construction of ‘British’ identity, and the Romantic gendering of cultures.
Romanticism and Romance, Donald MacKenzie:
One pole of romance as a canonical mode of the human imagination is the encounter with the other as strange - the strange fanning, variously, into the mysterious, the exotic, the alien, the sinister, the grotesque. It has an opposite, and defining, pole in the mundane: romance narratives from the Odyssey onwards can set encounter with the alien or exotic in the context of a final homecoming. This option will explore features of romance in texts of the English Romantic period. Topics will include Romantic Medievalism, quest-romance, and the Romantic Elegy.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1797-1817, Nicola Trott:
This course explores the protracted creative partnership of Wordsworth and Coleridge, from their earliest and most intimate collaboration in Lyrical Ballads through to the more distanced response to one another’s work in The Prelude and Biographia Literaria. The course will take account of external influences, including political and philosophical pressures; but the primary focus will be textual: we shall be examining the processes of allusion and poetic response, patterns of revision and elision, and the partnership’s rhythms of indebtedness and criticism. Special attention will be paid to contemporary questions of poetic diction and poetic language, to what was known at the time as the ‘Wordsworth controversy’; and to Coleridge’s role in what remains a contested area of our subject.
Romantic Women Poets, Alison Chapman:
Is there a separate tradition of women’s poetry in the Romantic era? Is there such a thing as a definable ‘female Romanticism’ evinced in women’s poetry, and to what extent does women’s poetry interact with Romantic poetry by men? We will be addressing these fundamental questions in this course, with reference throughout to the forging of the professional identity and vocation of the Romantic woman poet. The following issues will be explored: the construction of the Romantic ‘poetess’; women’s public and political poetry; modes of publication; salons and networks; celebrity and infamy; contemporary responses to women’s poetry. We will focus in particular on the following poets: Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Mary Tighe, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon
