Unit information: Literature 3: 1700 to 1830 in 2010/11

Unit name	Literature 3: 1700 to 1830
Unit code	ENGL39022
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director	Dr. James
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Some major authors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be studied. Poets to be covered will include, for instance, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Blake, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats; novelists and prose writers will include, for instance, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Johnson, Burney, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Mary Shelley; and dramatists will include, for instance, Sheridan.

Aims:

The aim of this unit is to give students a grounding in literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to introduce them to major authors, influential texts and literary movements, and in particular to develop students ways of understanding and describing the distinctive qualities of important writers of the period.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes will include: a greatly enhanced knowledge of the literature of the period; the ability to develop and express, in lucid and accurate prose, cogent arguments in essays; the ability to select and analyse pertinent passages from literary texts that support such arguments; the ability to make intelligent use of secondary criticism and theoretical perspectives (where appropriate); mastery of the technical vocabulary and analytical tools of literary criticism.

Teaching Information

3 x 1-hour lectures and 1 x 1-hour tutorial per week, plus one-to-one discussion in Consultation Hours where desired.

Assessment Information

2 x 2,000 word summative essays (50% each)

Reading and References

• Abrams, M.H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1971)

• Bate, Walter Jackson, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1970)

• Bloom, Harold, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1961; revised and enlarged edition, 1971)

• Fairer, David, ed., English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century: 1700-1789 (Harlow: Longman, 2002)

• McGann, Jerome J., The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983)

• Rogers, P., ed., The Context of English Literature: The Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1978)