For 11/26—Read Eliot, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" (pdf)

MS Word version of "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton"

Second Paper now due finals week (12/3)

Take-home Final now due at the end of finals week (12/5)

Click on "Schedule" to see these changes

Audio Recordings of Coleridge's Poetry

Kubla Khan

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Part the First
Part the Second
Part the Third
Part the Fourth
Part the Fifth
Part the Sixth
Part the Seventh

Audio Recordings of Shelley's Poetry

Ozymandias
Ode to the West Wind

Summer Reading Fun!

If you hope to survive ENGL 510 this Fall, consider starting (and finishing) at least one or two of the long Victorian novels we will be studying: Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and George Eliot's Mill on the Floss.

See Reading List at the bottom of this page for the editions I have ordered.

Bookstore Confusion

The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A might be listed in the bookstore as a required text. It is recommended, not required. I hope to make all of the readings available online, and most if not all will be available in any decent anthology of British literature (i.e. those published by Norton, Broadview, and others, including the "Major Authors" or "concise" editions). 

If you are interested in British Romantic literature, however, you are strongly encouraged to purchase the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A. It contains a fine selection of texts, excellent notes, and probably the best period introduction and author headnotes of all the anthologies.

Description

The Gothic and the Realistic are two primary strands in the history of the novel in Britain and both can be seen as emerging out of the literary and cultural tumult that surrounded the French Revolution and British Romanticism. In this course, we will begin by examining Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which according to Coleridge attempted to embody the twin energies that would later go by the names Gothic and Realistic. Coleridge’s task in the project was to write poems “directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.” Wordsworth’s task was “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 14). We will then focus on the figures of Byron and Wordsworth, who came to represent the Gothic and the Realistic, respectively, to the remainder of the nineteenth-century. These initial investigations of early nineteenth century British Romanticism will provide us with the foundation for our subsequent examination of the British novel from Austen to Eliot.

Please note that over the last eight weeks of the term we will be reading five novels, three of which weigh in at over 500 pages and one of which exceeds 1,000 pages.

Because this is a seminar class rather than a formal lecture course, active and informed contribution to class discussion is expected from all students.

Reading List

Required Texts:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. New York: Penguin, 1995. (0141439793)

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. (0199535590)

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York: Penguin, 2003. (0141439726)

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. New York: Penguin, 2003. (0141439629)

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. (0192832093)

Recommended Texts:

Wolfson, Manning, eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A. New York: Longman, 2006. (0321333942) OR Abrams, et al. Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D. New York: WW Norton, 2005. (0-393-92720-2).