The Romantic Age

Semester and Year Offered: (I/ III/ V)                     II semester

Course Coordinator and Team: TBD

Email of course coordinator:  TBD

Pre-requisites: None

Aim: The Romantic Age is often known as the ‘Age of Revolutions’ on account of the sweeping changes that were taking place during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century in the social, political, industrial and literary sphere. The course will help students understand this age of flux and upheaval through some of the seminal works of literature written during this time. The course is designed to introduce students to not just British Romanticism but also trace its influences in German and French literary thought. The course will introduce students to the figure of Rousseau and his ideas which greatly influenced Romantic thought. It will also discuss the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in German literature through the works of Goethe and other aspects of German romanticism through the writings of Schlegel. Having thus studied the foundations of Romanticism, the course would proceed to peruse the six most remarkable British Romantic poets- Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats. Then one would venture into the study of the relationship between Romanticism and its most remarkable sibling, the Gothic fiction. In all, the course seeks to introduce the students to all the hues and nuances of the Romantic Age in Europe.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Module 1: Introduction to Romanticism

This module will introduce students to the basic tenets of Romanticism and its uneasy relation with Enlightenment.

Module 2: German Literature and Romanticism

This module will look at the short but influential Sturm und Drang movement in German literature through the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe.

Module 3: Romanticism and the French Revolution

module will introduce students to the figure of Rousseau and his ideas on education through selections from his novel Emile. It will also provide students with a historical background of the French Revolution and the manner in which it influenced the English literary imagination.

Module 4: The British Romantic Poets

This module will bring into focus the six major Romantic Poets through their poetry and some of their prose works.

• William Blake: ‘The Chimney Sweeper’(Songs of Innocence and Experience); ‘The Lamb’; ‘The Tyger’
• William Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’; ‘The Intimations Ode’
• S.T. Coleridge: ‘Kubla Khan’; ‘Christabel’
• P.B.Shelley: ‘Ode to the West Wind’; ‘Ozymandias; ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’
• George Gordon Byron: Select cantos from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; ‘She Walks in Beauty’
• John Keats: ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’; Ode to Autumn’; ‘La Bella Dame Sans Merci’; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Module 5: Romanticism and the Gothic

This module will study the Gothic and its relation to Romanticism through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Refrence:

• Paulin, Roger. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry. Adelaide: Open Book Publishers, 2015.
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. New York: OUP, 2012.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. 1762. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.html>.
• Blake, William. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 1978.
• Wordsworth, William. The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1998.
• Coleridge, S.T. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 1997.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Toronto: Modern Library, 1994.
• Byron, George Gordon. Lord Byron: The Major Works. New York: OUP, 2008.
• Keats, John. John Keats: The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Books, 1973.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1816. New Delhi: Worldview, 2002.
• Polidori, John William. The Vampyre and Other Writings. Oxford: Carcanet, 2014.
• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Mineola, New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 2000.
• Peacock, Thomas Love. Nightmare Abbey. 1818. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9909/pg9909-images.html>.

Tentative Assessment schedule with details of weightage: