SemesterFall Semester, 2025
DepartmentJunior Class A, Department of English Junior Class B, Department of English Senior Class A, Department of English Senior Class B, Department of English
Course Name19th Century English Literature
InstructorCHEN YIN-I
Credit3.0
Course TypeSelectively
Prerequisite
Course Objective
Course Description
Course Schedule

  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.  



    2. William Wordsworth.I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud; Tintern Abbey, Samuel Coleridge. Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria.



     



    3. Coleridge. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; George Byron. Child Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan. Jane Austen (1 student presentation on Pride and Prejudice)



     



    4. Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Defence of Poetry; Ode to the West Wind; the romantic sublime; Mary Shelley (2 student presentation on Frankenstein)



     



    5. Holiday



    6. Holiday



    7. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn,  Romantic Prose: Charles Lamb, Old China;



    8. Romantic Prose: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; the Gothic and “strangeness in beauty” (3 student presentation on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho;  and Gothic Romance)





    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; 5 student presentation on Dickens (4 student presentation on Dickens’s Great Expectations)



     



    10. Victorian poetry: Tennyson. “Ulysses”; “In Memoriam” (stanzas 6, 7, 22, 27, 50, 55); the Brontës; mid-Victorian novels; 5 student presentation on Jane Eyre



     



    11. Victorian poetry: Browning (“My Last Duchess”); Prose: Ruskin (“The Stones of Venice”); 6 student presentation on Wuthering Heights



     



    12. Arnold “(“Dover Beach”); Arnold (“The Function of Criticism” “Culture and Anarchy”) 7 student presentation on George Eliot Mill on the Floss) ; read “The Woman Question”



    13. Exam



    14. Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel”); Pater (“The Renaissance”) and Aestheticism; “Late Victorians” Oscar Wilde (8 student presentation on The Picture of Dorian Gray)



     



    15. Late Victorian poetry (Hopkins, “The Windhover”)



    Late Victorian drama. Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw (9 student presentation on Mrs. Warren’s Profession); popular fiction



     



    16. Final




Teaching Methods
Teaching Assistant
Requirement/Grading

Mid-term:  30%



Final:  30%



Report: 30%



Mini-tests: 10%


Textbook & Reference

Norton Anthology to English Liteature II


Urls about Course
Attachment