Romantic Prose

elective courses

The students will read the selected romantic novels (by Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Emily Bronte) and the most important critical essays of the period (Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry). We will analyse and interpret them and the students will notice the existence of certain subgenres like the gothic novel , the regional novel, the emergence of the historical novel and they would also learn about the historical and cultural context of the epoch.

The students are going to read, analyse and interpret the selected novels from the epoch of the “long” Romanticism. They will start with the gothic novel from late 18th-century - Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance and published a little later Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They will also discuss some of Jane Austen’s novels of manners, mainly, Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Persuasion and we are going to discuss problems connected with love and marriage, women and their position in society, education of women, attitude to various fashions of the time (the gothic, the aesthetic theory of the picturesque), epistemological problems, the role of the body language in Persuasion, the specific use of language by some of the characters, the use of free indirect speech. We will also discuss the regional novel Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth ( about Ireland) and Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley about Scotland. Waverley will be also discussed as an example of the historical novel that started to appear in the Romantic period. We will discuss the historical and cultural reasons for the rise of the regional and the historical novel. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights from the early Victorian period will also be discussed as the novel written under a strong impact of Romanticism with its violent passions, dreams and supernatural elements and a great role nature. The critical essays of the epoch will be discussed to show the complicated and ambiguous role of the author and the subject in literature (Preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads) and the function of imagination and the problem of originality in the Defence of Poetry by B.P. Shelley.

The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period eds. Maxwell Richard and Katie Trumpener, 2008.

The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, eds. Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas, 2022.

Katie Tumpener, Bardic Nationalism. The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, 1997.

Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830, Longmans.

Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, 1972.

The participants of the course will obtain advanced knowledge about crucial issues of the Romantic period, especially about various types of the novel created at that time. They will improve their analytical skills. The discussions in class will help them to use logical arguments and to express their ideas in a clear, coherent and precise way in a correct English, on the grammatical, lexical and phonetical level.

Knowledge

- The place of English Studies among the humanities , the specific character of philology.

- The role of symbols in interpreting literature

Skills

- The ability to use methodology in literary studies

- The ability for bibliographical research and the ability of its evaluation

Social Skills

- The role of permanent learning Individual project , but the possibility of group activity

- Coherent and logical way of expression and communication

Oral examination (discussion of problems valid for the romantic prose) and the activity in class.