Andrew McInnes, Edge Hill University
Introduction
The module is designed to introduce postgraduate students to current debates in Romantic Studies and focuses on anti-racist approaches especially in the middle weeks of the module, from Week 3 to Week 7, as well as anti-racism forming the cornerstone of the module’s ethos, informing the construction of the syllabus throughout the 12 weeks of the module.
The module rethinks the Romantic period by bringing canonical and marginal texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into dialogue with twenty-first-century remediations of Romanticism. These contemporary reflections are studded throughout the module in the spirit of ‘undisciplining’ Romanticism, after Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, which is set reading in Week 3. Alongside Sharpe, we read NourbeSe M Philip’s Zong!, with both texts responding to the continuing legacy of the Atlantic slave trade today. Students often experience discomfort at reading twenty-first-century postmodern poetry in relation to their expectations of Romantic writing. However, this discomfort is an important pedagogical experience which feeds into our analyses of Romantic-period material including subsequent weeks on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the anonymous The Woman of Colour. The module also uses modern Gothic texts including Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse to consider the significance of witnessing atrocity (in relation to Perry’s rewriting of Charles Maturin’s original Melmoth the Wanderer) and, less seriously but also seriously, the role of playfulness in responding to the period in Riddell’s delirious mash-up of period personalities and peccadilloes in his children’s literature, reminding us that joy too is an act of resistance.
Throughout the module, students are confronted with criticism which reflects on the significance of Romanticism today, from the first week’s use of material from the Keats-Shelley Journal‘s ’50 Voices’ special issue and the second week’s engagement with Maureen McLane’s ‘Romanticism, or Now’ through to Manu Chander’s Brown Romantics and Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the Colonized World. Texts from the period are critiqued in terms of their investments in colonialism and white supremacy as well as being analysed in anti-racist terms as affording routes to liberation and revolution.
At the end of its first iteration in August 2022, the module inspired students to produce poster presentations displayed at the joint BARS/NASSR conference, New Romanticisms, held at Edge Hill University.
Syllabus “Romantic Movements”
Course Description
Romantic Movements is a Masters-level module on a specialist nineteenth-century studies programme which engages in cutting edge approaches to and debates within Romantic Studies, including: globalizing and interdisciplinary approaches to the Romantic period and its literature which seek to decentre popular and academic canons; challenges to and new ways of close reading Romantic poetry and other texts; the role of feeling and emotion in the period and its literature; the material culture of the period and ways in which this culture has been remediated from the nineteenth century to today, from popular adaptations in theatre, TV, film and other media to other re-imaginings. We will also consider its roots in environmentalism and how this inspires sustainability initiatives today. The module aims to give postgraduate students a panoramic vision of the state of the discipline of Romantic Studies today.
Schedule
Weeks 1 and 2: Romanticism, in Theory
Week 1 – Choose Your Own Romanticism
SET READING [all available on Learning Edge]
Choose one of the following texts [click on links in titles]:
Jane Austen, ‘We Are a Wounded Body’ [Extract from Northanger Abbey (1818) – final paragraph of chapter 5]
P B Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821, published 1840)
William Hazlitt, ‘William Wordsworth’ [from The Spirit of the Age (1825)]
Anne Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) Pair with one of the ’50 Voices’ essays in the Keats-Shelley Journal 2019 special issue [available on the Learning Edge] to formulate an answer to the above questions.
Week 2 – Romanticism, or Now
SET READING [all available on Learning Edge]
Maureen McLane, ‘Romanticism, or Now: Learning to Read in Postmodern,’ Modern Philology, 105.1 (August 2007), pp. 118-156
Select one of the following texts to close read:
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Life’
S T Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’
P B Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life’ Leigh Hunt, ‘A Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day’ [scroll to page 30 for essay]
Weeks 3-5: Undisciplining Romanticism
Week 3 – Zong!
SET READING
M NourbeSe Philip, Zong! [ebook available from the Library Catalogue]
Christina Sharpe, ‘The Ship’, from In the Wake [available on Learning Edge]
ADDITIONAL READING
Nicole Gervasio, “The Ruth in (T)Ruth: Redactive Reading and Feminist Provocations to History in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30.2 (2019): pp. 1–29.
Almas Khan, ‘Poetic Justice: Slavery, Law, and the (Anti-)Elegiac Form in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.1 (2015), pp 5–32.
Sasha Ann Panaram ‘Afrosporic Intimacies: Breath, Song, and Wind in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!‘, The Black Scholar, 49.3 (2019) ,pp. 21-35.
Kate Siklosi, ‘”the absolute / of water”: The Submarine Poetic of M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,’ Canadian Literature 228-229 (2016).
Week 4 Women of Colour I
SET READING
Anon, The Woman of Colour, ed. Lyndon J Dominique (Peterborough, Broadview: 2007)
ADDITIONAL READING
Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 45:7 (2016). 613-623.
Deanna P. Koretsky, ‘The Interracial Marriage Plot: Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic Period Women’s Fiction,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 51.1 (Spring 2018)
Enit Karafili Steiner, ‘Lessons of Skin: Cosmopolitan Solidarity in The Woman of Colour‘, Women’s Writing 27.1 (2020) pp. 46-62.
Hannah Young, “Negotiating female property- and slave-ownership in the aristocratic world,” The Historical Journal, 63(3), 581-602, 2020.
Week 5 – Women of Colour II
SET READING
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park [widely available in cheap print editions and online]
ADDITIONAL READING
Corinne Fowler, ‘Revisiting Mansfield Park: The Critical and Literary Legacies of Edward W. Said’s Essay “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism (1993)’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.3 (2017), pp. 362-381.
Sarah Marsh, ‘Changes of Air: The Somerset Case and Mansfield Park‘s Imperial Plots,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.2 (2020), pp. 211-233.
Patricia A. Matthew, ‘Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 61.4 (2019), pp. 345-361.
Emma Peacocke, ‘The British Museum and Fanny Price’s East Room,’ SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 59.4 (2019), pp. 719-739.
Week 6 – Independent Study Week
Weeks 7-9: Romanticism on the Move
Week 7: Brown Romanticism
SET READING [all available on Learning Edge]
Manu Samriti Chander, ‘Introduction’ / ‘Brown Keats’
Henry Derozio, Selection of Poems
John Keats, ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’
ADDITIONAL READING
Nikki Hessell, ‘Healing: Isabella, or the Pot of Tulāsi‘ in Romantic Literature and the Colonised World (London: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 195-227.
Emma Mason, Nineteenth Century Poetry: Criticism and Debates (Routledge Criticism and Debates Series, 2016).
Makarand R. Paranjape, ‘”East Indian” Cosmopolitanism,’ Interventions 13.4 (2011), pp. 550-569.
Sheshalatha Reddy, ‘Henry Derozio and the Romance of Rebellion (1809-1831),’ DQR Studies in Literature 53 (2014), pp. 27-42.
Week 8: Life Writing I
SET READING
S T Coleridge, Extracts from Notebooks [available on Learning Edge]
ADDITIONAL READING
Andrew McInnes, ‘Coleridge, the Ridiculous Child, and the Limits of Romanticism’ in Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, ed. Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 115-133.
Karen Swann, ‘Late Coleridge’ in Lives of the Dead Poets : Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 92-114.
Rei Terada, ‘Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction in Coleridge’s Notebooks,’ Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004), pp. 257-281.
Week 9: Life Writing II
SET READING
Ingrid Horrocks, ‘”Take, O World! Thy Much Indebted Tear!’: Mary Wollstonecraft Travels’ in Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 140-168 [available on Learning Edge]
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [available in print editions and online]
ADDITIONAL READING
Ingrid Horrocks, ‘“—–Pugh!”: Rereading Punctuation Through Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence,’ Women’s Writing 21.4 (2014), pp. 488-508.
Ingrid Horrocks, ‘Creating an “insinuating interest”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel reviews and A Short Residence’, Studies in Travel Writing 19.1 (2015), pp. 1-15.
Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, eds., Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Weeks 10-12: Romantic Futures
Week 10: Gothic Nightmares
SET READING
Sarah Perry, Melmoth (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018)
ADDITIONAL READING
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer [various editions available from the Library Catalogue]
Keith M C O’Sullivan, ‘His Dark Ingredients: The Viscous Palimpsest of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’ Gothic Studies 18.2 (2016), pp. 74-85.
Sarah Perry, ‘Out of My Mind,’ The Guardian, 29th September 2018
Dale Townsend and Angela Wright, “Gothic and romantic: An historical overview,” Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2015), pp. 9-44.
Week 11: Ridiculous Children
SET READING
Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (London: Pan Macmillan, 2013)
ADDITIONAL READING
Chloé Germaine Buckley, ‘From Gothic Wanderer to Nomadic Subject’ in Twenty-First Century Children’s Gothic (Ediburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 1-39.
Anna Jackson, Roderick McGills and Karen Coates, eds., The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders
Chris Riddell, ‘My Inspiration,’ The Guardian, 12th October 2014
Catherine Spooner, ‘Pretty in Black: The Goth Girl and the Whimsical Macabre’ in Post-Millennial Gothic : Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 99-119.
A student’s poster presentation displayed at the joint BARS/NASSR conference, New Romanticisms
