ENGLISH 365:
19th-Century
British Poetry and Prose
SPRING 2003
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews
phone: 472-1806
office: 1230-130 TR
and by appointment
TEXT: The Longman Anthology of British Literature,
Second Edition, Vol. 2
REQUIRED READING ASSIGNMENTS
Beginning page numbers for each selection are indicated in parentheses.
Unless otherwise indicated, you are to read the entire selection, as well as
all introductions to the authors. Many of these are excerpts rather than complete
works; in these cases you should read all of the excerpt provided in the anthology.
Tentative Schedule of Required Readings and Activities
* = turn
in reading notes in class on these days
Jan 14 T: Introduction to the period, the culture, and the expectations for this course
Jan 16 R: The Earlier Romantics, 1: Robinson and Wordsworth
"The Romantics and their Contemporaries" (3)
Mary Robinson: "January, 1795' (216), "The Camp" (220), "London's Summer Morning" (222), "The Haunted Beach" (221), "The Old Beggar" (223); Robinson's Letter the the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination
William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads (337), "Simon Lee" (338), "We Are Seven" (341), "Lines Written in Early Spring" (342), "The Thorn" (343), "Note to The Thorn" (348), "Expostulation and Reply" (350), "The Tables Turned" (350), "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (352), "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (356)
_____
Jan 21 T: The Earlier Romantics, 2: Charlotte Smith, William and Dorothy Wordsworth
Charlotte Smith: "To Melancholy" (50), "Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex" (51), "On being cautioned against walking on a headland overlooking the sea" (52)
William Wordsworth: "The world is too much with us" (386), "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802" (386), "London, 1802" (387), "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (453), "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (454)
Dorothy Wordsworth: "Address to a Child" (469), "The Grasmere Journals" (478)
Jan 23 R: The Earlier Romantics, 3: Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Sonnet to the River Otter" (522), "The Eolian Harp" (522), "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (524), "Kubla Khan" (545)
Jan 24 F: Last
day to withdraw from this course without a "W" on your permanent record
_____
Jan 28 T: Coleridge, concluded
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, Part 1" (526), "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [1817] (528)
Mary Robinson: "To the Poet Coleridge" (225)
Jan 30 R: A day for catching up
_____
Feb 4 T: Byron
George Gordon, Lord Byron: Don Juan, Dedication (668), Canto 1 (672) and excerpt from Canto 2 (717)
Feb 6 R: Byron, continued
George Gordon, Lord Byron: "Stanzas" ("When a man..."; 745), "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year" (746)
_____
* 11 T: The Younger Romantics, 1: Poetry, Politics, and Social Responsibility
Percy Bysshe Shelley: "To Wordsworth" (754), "Mont Blanc" (754), "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (758), "Ozymandias" (760), "England in 1819" (761),"To a Sky-Lark" (773)
Feb 13 R: The Younger Romantics, 2
Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Ode to the West Wind" (771), selection from A Defence of Poetry (800)
_____
Feb 18 T: The Younger Romantics, 3 Shelley and Keats
John Keats: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (854), "On sitting down to reading Lear once again" (864), "Sonnet: When I have fears" (865), "The Eve of St. Agnes" (865)
Feb 20 R: Keats
John Keats: "Ode to a Nightingale" (879), "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (882), "To Autumn" (886)
_____
Feb 25 T: Directions of later Romanticism: Hemans
Felicia Hemans: "The Wife of Asdrubal" (812), "Evening Prayer, at a Girls' School" (818), "Casabianca" (819), Records of Woman (820), "The Bride of the Greek Isles" (820), "Properzia Rossi" (825), "The Homes of England" (833), "The Graves of a Household" (834)
Feb 27 R: Midterm
Examination
_____
Mar 4 T: Introduction to the Victorian
Period
"The Victorian Age" (1008)
Mar 6 R: The Victorians and Work
Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present (1035; all selections)
Parliamentary Papers: (1053; both selections)
Charles Dickens: from Hard Times: [Coketown] (1057)
Friedrich Engels: from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1060); review of Carlyle's Past and Present
The Penny Magazine: a weekly magazine (1832-35) aimed at the working class
Mar 7 F: Last day to
change your grade status to or from "Pass / No Pass" for this course
_____
Mar 11 T: The Victorian Individual, and the
ordinary lives of the Victorians
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty (1075; both selections); The Subjection of Women (1086)
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man, Chapter 21: "General Summary and Conclusion" (1259)
*
13 R: 19th-century British visual art
link
to the Tate
Gallery collections, the premier collection of British art
_____
March 16 -23: Spring Break - No Classes
_____
Mar 25 T: Charles
Dickens and Victorian Fiction
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol (1357)
Mar 27 R: A Christmas Carol, continued;
see also "Dickens
and Christmas"
_____
Apr 1 T: Victorian Poetry, 1: Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "Mariana" (1139), "The Lady of Shalott" (1141), "Ulysses" (1150), "Tithonus" (1152), "Break, Break, Break" (1153), "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1195), "Crossing the Bar" (1229)
Apr 3 R: Tennyson, continued
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: selections from In Memoriam, A. H. H. (1165: specific sections will be assigned in class)
_____
Apr 8 T: Victorian Poetry, 2: Robert
Browning
Robert Browning: "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" (1309), "My Last Duchess" (1311), "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" (1314), "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" (1315), "Love Among the Ruins" (1321), "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1328)
Apr 10 R: Victorian Poetry, 3: Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese (1108; all selections), Prologue to "A Curse for a Nation" (1133), "A Musical Instrument" (1135), "The Best Thing in the World" (1136)
_____
Apr 15 T: A day for catching up
Apr 17 R: The Victorian social context: read anthology
selections as follows:
Frances Power Cobbe (1517), Sarah Stickney Ellis (1521), Caroline Norton (1528), Thomas Hughes (1536), Isabella Beeton (1538), Queen Victoria (1540)
Godey's Lady's Book: the most famous Victorian women's magazine
_____
* 22
T: Aesthetes, Decadents, and the closing of the Victorian era
"Aesthetes, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle (1939)
James McNeill Whistler: from "Mr. Whistler's ‘Ten O'Clock'" (1945)
Algernon Charles Swinburne: "The Leper" (1652), "Hymn to Proserpine" (1658), "A Forsaken Garden" (1661)
Apr 24 R: Aesthetes and Decadents, 2
Walter Pater: The Renaissance, Preface (1665) and Conclusion (1669)
Oscar Wilde: "Impression du Matin" (1862), "The Harlot's House" (1863), "Symphony in Yellow" (1864), selection from The Decay of Lying (1864), Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1883)
_____
Apr 29 T: A week of review, reconsideration, some
tentative conclusions, and a look ahead
Course
Portfolio due IN CLASS today
May 1 R: Discussion concludes, as does the course
_____
Final Examination: 10:00
- noon, Friday, 9 May
