31146 - English Literature 2 (A-L)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students will be acquainted with the lineaments of English literary history. They will be able to read, understand and translate texts from English into Italian, and to deal with some basic critical methods and tools, in order to elaborate comments and critical opinions on the literary texts read during the course.

Course contents

Nature, Ecology and the Environment

The course will embrace a methodology derived from Ecocriticism and Ecology in order to explore the complex relationship between English literature and the environment from the long eighteenth century to the Victorian period.

It is in fact during the Romantic period that literature starts to investigate the environmental as part of the human consciousness whose action have a strong impact on earth. And from such perspective, writers start to question the human place in the world, the relationship between human perception and the natural world, and our co-existence as human beings in the larger living organism of the earth.

Romantic discourse has helped to shape the discursive repertoire of environmental practices and perceptions today and it is useful to adopt such methodology to better understand the climate change of our time.

Readings will include poetry by James Thompson, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, John Clare, Percy B. Shelley and Lord Byron. Moreover novelists such as Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlese Dickens and Charlotte Brontë will be read from an ecological point of view in order to investigate the complex relation between the natural enviroment and city life.

The course includes an introductory part dedicated to the history of English literature from the Eighteenth century, the Romantic to the Victorian Period.

Readings/Bibliography

Primary Sources are available online in Virtuale

A selection of works will be read and discussed in class from: Mary Wallstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; A.L. Barbauld, "The Mouse Petition" and "Summer Evening Meditation"; W. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads; “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”; The Prelude; Dorothy Wordsworth, “Floating Island at Hawkeshead”; S.T. Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; Charlotte Smith, Sonnets; Beachy Head; Percy B. Shelley, “Mont Blanc”; Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, (canto four); "Darkness".
Novels: A. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (selections); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (complete); and The Last Man (selections); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (selection).

Secondary reading:

History of English Literature:

L. M. Crisafulli e K. Elam (a cura di), Manuale di letteratura e cultura inglese, Bologna, BUP, 2009.

Antologia delle poetesse romantiche (a cura di L.M. Crisafulli) 2 vols. Carocci, 2003. [schede bio-bibliografiche poetesse incluse in programma]

English Editions:

English Literature in Contex, ed. P. Poplawski (Cambridge UP 2008) Ch. 3 "Restoration and eighteenth Century"; Ch. 4 "The Romantic Period"; Ch. 5 "The Victorian Age".

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. II or The Oxford Anthology (sala consultazione - Biblioteca LLSM)

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, "The Age of Romanticism", second ed., Broadview Press 2010.

The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. J. Chandler, Cambridge UP 2009.

Critical reading:

Three essays from this list (4 for students who do not attend classes):

Colin Carman, The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment, Routledge, 2018.

Bate, Jonathan. “The Picturesque Environment," ch. 2, The Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology. Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge 1991.

McKusick, James C. Green Writing. St. Martins Press, 2000.

Anne Mellor, “Domesticating the Sublime” (Chapter 5); “Writing the Self/Self Writing” (Chapter 7) from A. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender.

Frankenstein and Its Environmnet, ed. J. E. Hogle, a special Issue of the Huntington Library Quartely, University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 83, Number 4, Winter 2020 [https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/44365]

Jim McKusick's "Coleridge and the Economy of Nature," Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 375-392.

Morton Paley's "Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,"<http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/paley.htm >

Jonathan Bate's "Living with the Weather," Studies in Romanticism 35:3 (Fall 1996): 431.

Alan Bewell, “John Clare and the Ghosts of Natures Past, Nineteenth-Century Literature , Vol. 65, No. 4 (March 2011), pp. 548-578.

Elizabeth Helsinger, “Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet”, Critical Inquiry, 1987, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 509-531.

Clark, T. (2011). The Cambridge introduction to literature and the environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Victorian Writers and the Environment, Ecocritical Perspectives Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, Routledge, 2017.

Victorian Ecocriticism: The politics of place and early environmental justice. Ed. Hall, D. W. (2017) Lexington Books [Ch. 1: Introduction "The Matter of Place-Consciouness"; Ch. 3: "The Material Turn in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre"; Ch. 4: "Factor Education, Factor System, and the Preston Strike"]

 

Teaching methods

Frontal lectures in English: introduction of the literary periods from the eighteenth century to the Victorian age; reading and comment of the primary sources; videos and film adaptations from literary works.

Assessment methods

The evaluation of the students' competencies and abilities acquired during the course consists in a written work at the end of the course for those students who attended classes regularly as well as for those who do not attend classes.

The written test is divided into two parts: the first will be made of open questions concerning the literary history of the period from the Eighteenth century to the Victorian period; the second part will require a series of critical comments on the topics and texts listed in the syllabus.

Those students,who are able to demonstrate a wide and systematic understanding of the issues covered during classes, are able to use these critically and who master the field-specific language of the discipline will be given a mark of excellence. Those students who demonstrate a mnemonic knowledge of the subject with a more superficial analytical ability and ability to synthesize, a correct command of the language but not always appropriate, will be given a satisfactory mark. A superficial knowledge and understanding of the material, a scarce analytical and expressive ability that is not always appropriate will be rewarded with a ‘pass' mark. Students who demonstrate gaps in their knowledge of the subject matter, inappropriate language use, lack of familiarity with the literature in the program bibliography will not be given a pass mark.

Teaching tools

Online resourses available for student online; film and videos show during lectures.

Office hours

See the website of Serena Baiesi