Set books
Most of the material for this module will be available
electronically via the module website. In addition, you will need to
obtain:
- William
Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford World’s Classics)
- M. G.
Lewis, The Monk, ed. D. L. Macdonald and K. Scarf
(Broadview)
Please
buy this edition as we will be using material in the appendices
- William
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dover/ other
illustrated edition)
Preparation
There are two full-length novels on the module: Godwin’s ‘Jacobin
novel’ Caleb Williams, to be studied around Week 4, and Lewis’s Gothic
novel The Monk, a key text in the ‘Ghosts’ part of the module, around
Weeks 9 and 10. Please aim to read one or both of these in advance.
The first half of the module is devoted to texts
and images inspired by the French Revolution, including eye-witness accounts by
Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams and William Wordsworth, newspaper
reports, and extracts from political pamphlets by Burke, Paine, Godwin and
others. We’ll explore the impact of emigration from Revolutionary France
through Charlotte Smith’s poem The Emigrants and we’ll read
Coleridge and Southey’s play The Fall of Robespierre, based on the
extraordinary events of Thermidor. Alongside written texts we’ll study a large
range of images, examining the iconography of revolution and counter-revolution
in satirical prints by artists such as James Gillray and Isaac
Cruikshank. We’ll give particular attention to the symbolism of the Bastille,
whose capture and destruction in 1789 was the iconic event of the French Revolution,
and to the symbol of the guillotine, which encapsulated the second, more bloody
phase of the Revolution.
To prepare, try to find out all you can about the
French Revolution and its impact in Britain. Useful overviews (click links for
download) are Jon Mee, ‘The Revolutionary
Decade’, in The Oxford Handbook of British
Romanticism and David Duff, ‘From Revolution to
Romanticism: The Historical Context to 1800’ in The
Blackwell Companion to Romanticism. Rachel Hewitt’s book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that
Forged the Modern Mind is another suggestive and accessible overview of the 1790s.
Apart from The Monk, the ‘Ghosts’ section of
the module will include horror ballads by Lewis, Southey and the German poet Gottfried
Bürger, whose famous poem ‘Lenora’ started the horror ballad craze and was
endlessly imitated and parodied. In this context, we’ll also study ‘lyrical
ballads’ by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, which were intended to
counteract what they saw as the degraded sensationalism of the Gothic horror
ballads. Blake’s multi-media work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which
attempts an even more radical transformation of consciousness, will also
feature.
For scientific writing, the third strand of the
module, a good introduction is Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: How
the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Particularly relevant is the chapter on ‘Davy on the Gas’. Davy was an
accomplished poet as well as a famous chemist, and we will be studying some of
his poetry alongside accounts of his ‘laughing gas’ experiments. If possible,
we will do a field trip to the Royal Institution, founded in 1799, where Davy lectured
on chemistry to the fashionable elite of Mayfair and where Coleridge also lectured.
