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ESH6079

Guillotines, Ghosts and Laughing Gas: The Revolutionary 1790s

Level 6 (30 credits)

The 1790s was a turbulent decade in which literature, politics, and science interacted in unprecedented ways. Romantic innovations in poetry coincided with a cult of Gothic horror, remarkable discoveries in science, and an explosive pamphlet war unleashed by the French Revolution. This module explores the distinctive culture of the revolutionary decade, studying poems, novels, and plays by for example Samuel Coleridge, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, `Monk' Lewis and other writers alongside Jacobin and anti-Jacobin polemics, political cartoons, and experiments with `laughing gas' in the laboratories of the poet-chemist Humphry Davy.

Preparing for this Module and Approximate Costs

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.


Estimated costs of primary texts £27. This can be reduced by buying the texts second-hand or borrowing them from the library. If we make a field trip to the Royal Institution or other venue, an additional cost will be a return tube or bus fare to central London.


 
Why take
Guillotines, Ghosts and Laughing Gas: The Revolutionary 1790s
?

·       Discover how the 'Terror' of the French Revolution is connected with the 1790s craze for Gothic horror novels and ballads.

·       Read literary texts by Romantic authors alongside political pamphlets and satirical cartoons from this golden age of visual caricature.

·       Find out about the experiments with 'laughing gas' (nitrous oxide) that brought writers and scientists together and caused a cultural sensation in the late 1790s.


Learning Context Long Seminar + Workshop (or equivalent)
Semester Two
Assessment
  1. Written Assignment 1 (1500 words), 25%
  2. Presentation (10 mins), 15%
  3. Written Assignment 2 (3500 words), 60%
Mode of reassessment Standard
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