English 965: Seminar in
19th-Century British Literature
— Spring 2010 —
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office: 10-11 daily,
and by appointment
Email Stephen Behrendt here
This course is conceived as a symposium, a work-group of interested scholars who will spend sixteen weeks investigating the subject of labor – “work” – as it appears in Britain in both canonical and extra-canonical works in literature and the other arts between roughly 1750 and 1850. Our approach will be interdisciplinary and collaborative; we will devise a schedule and work out various tasks and task-groups that will involve us all, individually and collectively, in our study. Our arrangement will be somewhat unconventional, and it will definitely be demanding. We shall need to think of ourselves as a community of scholars and collaborators, and we shall need to contribute actively to one another’s work and to the products we will generate by semester’s end.
Beginning with 18th-century working-class poets like Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, we will examine attitudes toward “work” as they evolved in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. We’ll look, early on, at William Hogarth’s series of engravings, Industry and Idleness, to see what they tell us about social, economic, and moral attitudes toward labor and laborers. We’ll consider what early Romantic-era poets like Joanna Baillie, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge do with the subjects both of work and of those who labor (and how they are regarded in general society). We’ll read Robert Bloomfield’s enormously popular The Farmer’s Boy, now seldom studied, and we’ll consider what its relative neglect (and the neglect of other laboring-class writers) among traditional scholars tells us about enculturated academic attitudes toward “work” and workers.
Other laboring-class writers we may consider include the poets Ann Candler, Catharine Quigley, and Frances O’Neill and fiction writers like Barbara Hofland. We’ll also look at Blake and others (like Mary Alcock and Charles Lamb) on the subject of chimney sweepers, which introduces the subject of child labor. We’ll consider the effects os industrialization in Britain (and elsewhere), including the displacement of labor, the Luddites, and the radical social activist writings of later Romantics like PB Shelley and Letitia Landon. We’ll also examine some of the “theoretical” writings on labor by Romantic-era thinkers like Bentham, Malthus, Cobbett, and the Radical journalists John Thelwall, William Hone, and Thomas Wooler, as well as Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England. And we will consider how all these considerations point ahead toward early Victorian writing by Carlyle (“Captains of Industry”), Dickens (A Christmas Carol, Hard Times [dedicated to Carlyle], Oliver Twist), Disraeli (Sybil) Gaskell (North and South) and others, and to visual works like Ford Madox Brown’s Work. Along the way – a lot of visual art from both the “high” (or “fine”) arts and the popular art of caricature and broadside. We will also look at selected (including self-selected) readings from current contemporary criticism and theory to help us better assess our materials.
During the course of our work we will consider many different aspects of the seminar topic, approaching them from various disciplinary, critical and theoretical perspectives. While we will undoubtedly generate a great many questions as we go along, in order to give you some sense of the range of our inquiries and the sorts of issues with which I hope we will wrestle for the sixteen weeks of our symposium, I have posted a very tentative list of preliminary questions at this link.
• Active, engaged, and consistent discussion.
• Solid contributions to group activities like bibliography-building, name-tagging, etc.
• Individual and group presentations, both formal and informal.
• Periodic brief written submissions: response papers, research summaries, etc.
• A final scholarly research project appropriate for a 900-level course.Project Timeline:
1 March (Monday): Submit (in writing) tentative topic and thesis
22 March (Monday): Submit full prospectus, with preliminary annotated bibliography
29 April (Monday, our final regular session): Submit complete project and all related materials
— You will find some these readings, along with other materials, on the course site on Blackboard
Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy
Thomas Carlyle. Past and Present (selections)
Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens. Hard Times
Benjamin Disraeli. Sybil
Friedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England
Elizabeth Gaskell. North and South
Barbara Hofland. The History of an Officer’s Widow and Her Young Family
selections from poetry by Mary Alcock, Joanna Baillie, William Blake, Robert Burns, Ann Candler, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Collier, Stephen Duck, Thomas Hood, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Caroline Norton, Frances O’Neill, Catharine Quigley, Anna Seward, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ellen Taylor, William Wordsworth and others
prose selections from Jeremy Bentham, William Cobbett, Charles Lamb, Thomas Malthus, Henry Mayhew, John Thelwall, Melesina Trench, Thomas Wooler and others
visual works by William Hogarth, William Blake, Ford Madox Brown, George Cruikshank, James Gillray and others
various secondary readings in history, economics, literary and cultural theory
During the course of the semester, we will compile a “master” bibliography of primary and secondary materials relating to the subject of the seminar. At semester’s end, we will post a final version of this bibliography to an Internet site – probably the one I maintain for Studies in Romanticism at UNL. Early in the semester, we will work out arrangements for compiling and maintaining this bibliography project.
Because we will be working both as a study group and as a community of discrete, independent scholars, pursuing both the combined program of our symposium’s overall design and the individual research projects each of us will undertake, we will all need to budget our time and resources effectively and – perhaps most important of all – to keep one another posted on how we are doing on each of these tasks. We can use the communication tools on Blackboard for interacting with one another outside our weekly sessions (I will also circulate your phone and email contacts). I will also do whatever I can to assist you with your individual projects, and I will be happy to help put you into contact with the appropriate resource people at Love Library (and elsewhere) with whom you will work over the course of this semester, and beyond. Please keep me posted, therefore, on the evolving design and progress of your work and on anything you may need from me as you proceed.
Please feel free to chat with me at any time about anything having to do with this course, or with your program of studies generally. I will be happy to help in any way I can, within reason. I will maintain my announced office hours; if something prevents me from doing so, I will post a note of explanation at my office. If my formal office hours do not work for you, we can usually make an appointment at some mutually convenient time, since I am on campus a good deal every week.
Students with disabilities are encouraged to contact the instructor for a confidential discussion of their individual needs for academic accommodation. It is the policy of the University of Nebraska - Lincoln to provide flexible and individualized accommodation to students with documented disabilities that may affect their ability to fully participate in course activities or to meet course requirements. To receive accommodation services, students must be registered with the services for students with Disabilities (SSD) office, 132 Canfield Administration, 472-3787 voice or TTY.