1. The Romantic Period: (1) The French Revolution and the Spirit of the Age (2) the cult of sensibility and Romantic nature (from the picturesque to the sublime) (3) the role of poet and imagination (4) individualism (5) Gothic romance. William Blake. Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience;
2. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud; Tintern Abbey
3. Samuel Coleridge. Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Jane Austen (1 student presentation on Pride and Prejudice)
4. Coleridge. George Byron. Child Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan. Mary Shelley (2 student presentation on Frankenstein)
5. Holiday
6. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ozymandias; Ode to the West Wind; the romantic sublime; Walter Scott and historical romance; Romantic Prose: Charles Lamb, Old China
7. John Keats, Letters, Ode to Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn; Romantic Prose: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; the Gothic and “strangeness in beauty” (3 student presentation on Ann Radcliffe and Gothic Romance)
8. Mid-term exam
9. The Victorian Age. Background: Miscellaneous era; (1) industrial progress; Protestantism and Bentham’s philosophy, laissez-faire; (2)class and gender problems; decline of religion and rise of natural and human sciences; the “Condition of England” issue – Carlyle, Auden, Ruskin; the “Woman Question” – separate spheres, virgin and harlot, “New Woman”; Empire and decline; Brief survey of Victorian fiction, poetry, drama and prose; student assignments of major novels and drama
10. Victorian prose and poetry: Carlyle (“Sartor Resartus"); read “The Condition of England Issue;” Tennyson “Ulysses;”“In Memoriam” (stanzas 6, 7, 22, 27, 50, 55) ; early Victorian novels, 4 student presentation on Dickens’s Great Expectations
11. Victorian Prose: Ruskin (“The Stones of Venice); Poetry: Browning (“My Last Duchess"); the Brontes; mid-Victorian novels; 5 student presentation on Jane Eyre
12. Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel”); 7 student presentation on Wuthering Heights
13. Victorian poetry and prose: Arnold “(“Dover Beach”, “The Function of Criticism” “Culture and Anarchy"). student presentation on George Eliot ( 8 student presentation on Mill on the Floss) 2; read “The Woman Question”
14. Pater (“The Renaissance” 1638-1644) and Aestheticism; “Late Victorians”. Oscar Wilde (9 student presentation on The Picture of Dorian Gray)
15. Late Victorian poetry (Hopkins, “The Windhover”)Late Victorian drama. Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw (10 student presentation on Mrs. Warren’s Profession); popular fiction (Robert L. Stevenson)(women’s sensation novel)
16. Final exam
17. Holiday
18. Self-study
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