William Wordsworth An Evening Walk (1793 on line and in
xerox) and
Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795, xerox only).
Requirements:
Reading:
I have set up the readings initially into a Primary/Secondary format,
since I want to begin by concentrating on the gothic fiction from which
our sense of gothic is usually derived. By the middle of the course,
however, I hope that we will begin to find the critical and source
materials often as interesting as the fiction, drama, and poetry. The
readings are intentionally heavier early in the course, and become
lighter as we move on.
Weekly Responses:
This course requires you to be on e-mail, since part of the weekly
preparation for our meetings will be for you to write a weekly response
that you will send to the e-mail address
gamer550@dept.english.upenn.edu. These responses will be due on Tuesday,
by noon, beginning on September 19 (week three). They constitute the
single most important part of the course, since they will be the basis
from which we begin our discussions, and will play a key role in my sense
of your involvment and performance in the course. You will also find, if
you look on your e-mail before you compose your response, that many times
the responses of your colleagues will prove to be as much a catalyst to
your own writing as the reading itself. Before class on Thursday, then,
you will be required to read through the responses, and to print them up
and bring them in. So, for weeks 3-11 (until Thanksgiving), this will be
our weekly schedule: responses due by noon Tuesday, reading and printing
of responses done by the time we meet as a class on Thursday.
The Short Presentation:
Once during the semester, I am going to ask you to do a 5-7 minute
presentation on a periodical in the period, focusing particularly on the
relation between that periodical's political and social position in
British literary culture and how it reviews gothic fiction and drama in
general, and our text for that week in particular. During that week, you
are not required to do a response on the class listserver, though you're
welcome to contribute to that discussion if you would like to do so. I
promise to stop anyone who goes over seven minutes.
The Final Paper:
Rather than having you write an article-length essay of 25 or more
pages, I am instead assigning a conference paper of no more than
2500
words, which you will give at our final meeting, which will take place in
the form of a proper conference in Penniman Lounge at 3 p.m. Your paper
titles, and a 1-2 page abstract, are due on November 30. I will attempt,
as far as I am able, to organize them into panels for our conference. If
you would like to organize your own panels of three papers, I absolutely
welcome and encourage you to do so. As conference papers are usually
abbreviated or skeletal versions of an article, you should expect this
final assignment to require significant research and your utmost care in
the formulating of its argument. For your abstract and for your paper, I
will make practical suggestions regarding various issues of
professionalization ("How does one write an abstract?"), as well as
responding to your argument and presentation with an eye toward how to
revise your paper into an article.
Course Calendar
Sept 7: Primary: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara
Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778). Secondary: in the packet,
there will also be the first three chapters from Robert Miles's recent
study, Gothic Writing: A Genealogy (1993).
September 14: Primary: Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (1796).
Secondary: read Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's reviews of gothic novels from 1794-1798 (in xerox
and on line).
September 21: Primary: Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1797).
Secondary: Edmund
Burke, "On
Taste" and selections from A
Philosophical Enquiry into
our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757, in xerox and on
line);
David Hume, "Of
Tragedy"
September 28: Primary: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey.
Secondary: Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (last two chapters), and
Anna
Letitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John
Aikin, "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,
With Sir Bertrand, A Fragment" (1773).
October 5: William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk (1793) and
Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1794-95). Karen Swann, "Public
Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain" (1988:
ELH 55:811-834); Alan Liu, "The Politics of the Picturesque:
An Evening Walk" (1989: from Wordsworth: The Sense of
History).
October 12: Robert Bage, Hermsprong (1796); Ronald Paulson,
"Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution" (1981: ELH 48:532-554).
October 19: Mary Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
(1798). Lawrence Stone, "Sex,
Money, and Murder in Eighteenth-Century England" (in xerox and on
line) and Anna Clark, "Women's
Pain, Men's Pleasure: Rape in the Late Eighteenth Century" (in xerox
and on line, from Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in
England, 1770-1845, Pandora, 1987).
October 26: Matthew Lewis, Castle Spectre, A Drama in Five
Acts (1798) in Seven Gothic Dramas; Joanna Baillie,
"Introductory Discourse" (1798, xerox), De Montfort (1798) in
Seven Gothic Dramas. Read Jeff Cox, "Introduction" in
Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825 (Ohio UP, 1992). ERIK SIMPSON,
THE ANTI-JACOBIN, and DAVID HITCHENS, THE MONTHLY MIRROR.
November 2: Walter Scott, Marmion (1807, xerox); Lord Byron,
The Giaour (1812). Marlon Ross, "Scott's Chivalric Pose: The
Function
of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period" (1986: Genre
18:267-297).
November 9: Charlotte Dacre, Hours of Solitude (1805), and
Adriana Craciun, "'I hasten to be disembodied': Charlotte Dacre, the
Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body" European Romantic Review
(1994). You may also wish to take a look at a Drinking
Song by Dacre. Reports:
SUSAN ESSMAN AND ASELDA THOMPSON, THE BELLE ASSEMBLEE.
November 16: Percy Shelley, The
Cenci (1819, xerox) and Charles Maturin, Bertram in
Seven Gothic Dramas. MAURICE BLACK, THE QUARTERLY
REVIEW.
November 30: Lord Byron, Don Juan, Cantos X-XVII; John Clare,
"don juan a poem"; Raymond Williams, "Introduction"; Edward Strickland,
"Boxer Byron: A Clare Obsession" (1989: The Byron Journal
17:57-76). Abstracts and paper titles due.
December 7: End of Semester Conference.