Semester	Fall Semester, 2025
Department	MA Program of English, First Year Ph.D. Program in English Literature, First Year MA Program of English, Second Year Ph.D. Program in English Literature, Second Year
Course Name	Anglo-American Romantic Spaces
Instructor	HSU LI-HSIN
Credit	3.0
Course Type	Elective
Prerequisite

Course Objective

Course Description

Course Schedule

The first class will begin on 9th September 2025.

Week 1: Landscape, Literature, and the Environment

Topic:

Introduction to Anglo-American Romanticism:

Primary reading:

Wordsworth's "I wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "Ruth"

Emily Dickinson's "Remembrance has a Rear and Front -"

Secondary reading:

Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space" Chapter 1: The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut.

Week 2: Lakes, Rivers, Prairies and Swamps

Topic:

The Lake School and Provincialism (Wordsworth/Thoreau)

Primary reading:

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

William Cullen Bryant: “The Prairies” (1832)

John Rollin Ridge: "A Scene along the Rio De Las Plumas"

Thoreau's Walden Chapter 9 The Ponds

Secondary reading:

The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Chapter 5)

Bachelard's Poetics of Space (Chapter 8: Intimate Immensity)

"Wordsworth and Thoreau: Two Versions of Pastoral" by Greg Garrard (Thoreau's Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing)

"Ghoulish Hinterlands: Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives" by Jericho Williams (EcoGothic in Nineteenth-Century Literature)

Richard Gravil's "'The Reign of Nature'; or, Mr Bryant’s Wordsworth"

Week 3: Oceans, Islands, and Shipwrecks

Topic:

The Ocean and Cosmopolitanism (Coleridge/Melville)

Primary reading:

Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (Carolyn)

Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanza"

Melville: Moby Dick (Chapter 1)

Secondary reading:

Hsuan L. Hsu's "The checkered globe": cosmopolitan despair in the American Pacific (Chapter 4 of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature)

Mitchell: "Landscape and Power"

Samuel Baker's "Introduction: familiar with the sea" or "Shipwreck for the poet" (Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture)

Week 4: Gender and Mobility

Topic: Space and Gender (Bronte/Alcott, Fuller/Sedgewick)

Primary reading:

Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal to Scotland (August 20, 25-28)

Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes (Chapter 1)

Secondary reading:

Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Chapter 1. Feminism at the Border: Nature, Indians, and Colonial Space)

Susan Robertson’s “Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road” (Chapter 3)

Tuan Yi-Fu's Space and Place (Chapter 9: Time in Experiential Place)

Kevin Hutchings' "Romantic Niagara" (Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race, and Nation edited by Dr Julia M Wright, Dr Kevin Hutchings)

Week 5: The Orient, the Mythical, and the Dreamscape

Topic:

Space and the Orient (Keats/De Quincey/Poe)

Primary reading:

Emily Dickinson's "Civilization - spurns - the Leopard!"

Coleridge: "Kubla Khan"

De Quincey: The Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (May 1818)

Keats: "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil"

Secondary reading:

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease ("Keats and the Geography of Consumption")

Jim Egan's "Edgar Allan Poe’s Oriental America" (Chapter 4 of Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature)

Andrew Warren's “'unperplexing bliss': The Orient in Keats’s Poetics" (Chapter 5 of The Orient and the Young Romantics)

Peter J. Kitson's Forging Romantic China (Chapter 7: Chinese Gardens, Confucius, and The Prelude) or "The Wordsworths, Opium and China")

Tuan Yi-Fun's Space and Place (Chapter 7: Mythic Space and Place)

Hsu, Li-hsin's "Emily Dickinson's Asian Consumption"

Nikki Hessell, Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations (Chapter 7: Healing: Isabella, or The Pot of Tulāsi).

Week 6: Metropolis, Plantations, and the Empire

Topic:

Space and the Empire (Blake/Whitman)

Primary reading:

Joanna Baillie: "Lines to a Teapot"

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (Book III: Song of Myself)

Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience ("The Chimney-Sweeper", "London")

Secondary reading:

Alan Bewell's "Erasmus Darwin's Cosmopolitan Nature" (Chapter 2 of Natures in Translation)

Raymond Williams’s “The Country and the City” Chapter 1, 2, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24

Homi K. Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture” Chapter 8: Dissemination

J. B. Harvey’s “The New Nature of Maps” (Chapter 6)

"Introduction: Environmentalism, Class and Nature" by Ve-Yin Tee (Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire)

Robert Abrams' "Introduction" to Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies of Skepticism

Week 7: House, Home, and the Universe

Topic:

The Domestic Space & The Universe

Primary reading:

Coleridge: "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison"

Wordsworth: "Star-Gazers" and "‘Sky-Prospect: From the Plain of France"

Hawthorne's The House of The Seven Gables (1851): Chapter 1, 10, 20,

Walden Chapter 2 & 3

De Quincey: "The System of the Heavens" (1846)

Secondary reading:

Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" (Chapter 2 House and Universe)

De Quincey's System of the Heaven (Cian Duffy)

Massey’s “Space, Place and Gender” (Chapter 9: A Woman’s Place?)

Richard Holmes's "Joseph Banks in Paradise" (The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science)

Tuan Yi-Fu's Space and Place (Chapter 5: Spaciousness and Crowding)

Week 8: Nature & the Machanic Age

Primary reading:

Carlyle: "Signs of the Times"

Emerson: "Nature"

Week 9: Gardens & Railways

Topic:

The Pastoral and the Mechanical (Wordsworth/Emerson/Hawthorne/Carlyle)

Primary reading:

T. W. Higginson: "The Out-Door Papers" (Gymnastic & My Out-Door Study)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini’s Daughter"

Wordsworth's "The Excursion"

Wordsworth: "Michael" & "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways"

Hawthorne: "The Celestial Railway" (1843)

Secondary reading:

Romantic Vagrancy by Celeste Langan (Chapter 4: The Walking Cure)

The Practice of Everyday Life (Chapter 7: Walking in the City)

Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Chapter 1)

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and the Ecogothic" by Lesley Ginsberg (Ecogothic in Nineteenth- Century American Literature)

Week 10: Walking, Travelling & Tourism

Topic:

Travelling Sketches and Tourism

Primary reading:

Irving: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.("Rural Life in England","English Writers on America","Straford-upon-Avon")

Robert Louis Stevenson: "Across the Plain", "The Old Pacific Capital"

Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Recollection of a Gifted Woman”

Washington Irving’s “Westminster Abbey”

Secondary reading:

Paul Westover’s “Necromanticism” (Chapter 5: The Transatlantic Invention of “English” Literary Heritage)

RLS: Writer of Boundaries: "Whitman and Thoreau as Literary Stowaways in Stevenson’s American Writings"

Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes (1983), Chapter 5, 7, 11, 13

"The “Phantasmatic” Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” and Mark Twain’s Roughing It" by Li-hsin Hsu (Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums, 1750‒1918)

Week 11: Gothic Spaces and Haunted Houses

Topic:

The Gothic and the Monstrous (Spofford, Poe, Austen)

Primary reading:

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (Franck)

Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" (Chapter 20-24) (Tiffany)

Emily Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility -" (Riona)

Emily Dickinson's "One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted -"

Secondary reading:

Yi-fu, Tuan. "Space and Place" (Chapter 12: Visibility: The Creation of Place)

"Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters in the Forest" by Elizabeth Parker (Chapter 4 of The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination) (Jimmy)

"Introduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers" by Sue Edney (EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century) (Tiffiny)

The Freud Reader “The Unconscious” & “Repression”

Week 12: Critical Island Studies and Blue Humanities

Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 ( Gilles Deleuze) "Desert Islands" (pp. 9-14)

Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey's "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Chapter five: An Island is a World)

Week 13: Mid-term study break

Week 14: Textual & Virtual Spaces

Topic:

Romance, Realism, and Virtual Reality (Stevenson/James)

Primary reading:

Emily Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility -"

Henry James: "The Art of Fiction" (1884)

Stevenson: "A Humble Remonstrance" (1884)

Secondary reading:

"Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination" (Daniel Schneider)

RSL: Writer of Boundaries ("The Four Boundary-Crossings of R. L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist" or "Figures in a Landscape: Scott, Stevenson, and Routes to the Past" by Jenni Calder)

Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality by Peter Otto (Introduction)

"EcoGothic Chinatown" by Li-hsin Hsu (Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire)