ENGLISH 250

Percy Bysshe Shelley--Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Syllabus

7 September: Introductory meeting.

12 September: early poems; Queen Mab.

14 September: Queen Mab.*

19 September: "Alastor"*; "To Wordsworth."

21 September: "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; "Mont Blanc."

26 September: Frankenstein.*

28 September: Frankenstein.

3 October: Frankenstein.; excerpts from The Revolt of Islam.*

5 October: "To Constantia"; "On Love"; "On Life"; "Lines Written among the Eugenean Hills."

10 October: "Julian and Maddalo"; "Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples."

12 October: Matilda

19 October: The Cenci*

24 October: Prometheus Unbound, Act I.*

26 October: Prometheus Unbound, Acts 2-3.

31 October: "The Mask of Anarchy"*; "Ode to Liberty"; "Ode to the West Wind"*; "Peter Bell the Third," part 3.

2 November: Prometheus Unbound, Act 4; "The Cloud"; "To a Skylark."*

7 November: Valperga*; "Giovanni Villani."

9 November: Valperga.

14 November: Epipsychidion.*

16 November: "The Witch of Atlas"*; "A Philosophical View of Reform"; "Defence of Poetry."

21 November: Adonais.*

28 November: Hellas*

30 November: "The Triumph of Life."

5 December: The Last Man.*

7 December: The Last Man.

NOTE: shorter lyrics, incidental prose, and facsimiles from manuscripts will be added where appropriate to fill out the range of both authors.

• The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson (OxfordUP)--includes Frankenstein and Matilda.
• The Last Man (Oxford UP).
• Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon Powers (Norton).
• Valperga will be available in electronic form and printout.

• A true seminar requires a collaborative participation by all involved: thus any absence from the full discussion will be such a rare event as to call attention to itself.
• The 15 works marked with an asterisk were reviewed at the time of their publication: each seminar participant will be responsible for reading contemporary reviews of one of the works, digesting them, and representing the notices by commentary and selective quotation in an email message mailed to the entire seminar (or posted within an electronic directory for the seminar) no later than 24 hours before the meeting in which the work is discussed.
• Similarly, each participant will be reponsible for formulating a set of questions for one meeting of the seminar drawn from the materials for the day. These should be emailed to the entire seminar no later than 24 hours before the meeting.
• There is an extensive library of criticism on the works of both authors. Although it is important that seminar participants maintain a sense of their own critical independence, it is also necessary to integrate such individual perspectives with this accumulated critical context. Relevant (and non-taxing) assignments will be made for all participants with this end in mind.
• Seminar participants will write a final essay of approximately 15 pages on some point of interrelationship between the two authors' work: due no later than 11 December.