This course imagines its title, “Literary History” not as a given, but rather a problem for investigation. How has literary history been constructed at different moments? This course inquires into the specific cultural practices that construct “Literature” with readings chosen from British, American and Anglo-phone literatures and from various genres.
Each section of “Literary History” focuses its inquiry on selected periods. The topic of this section is “Romantics in Context: The Meaning and Making of Anglo-American Romantic Traditions.” Our work this semester examines the production and circulation of literary texts by writers who have come to be associated with “Romantic” traditions in Great Britain and America. Traditionally, the relationship between British and American Romantics has been understood in terms of the “influence” of British traditions on American authors. Our course will examine the uses and limits of this view. Looking at a range of “literary” and other kinds of writing from 1789 to the mid 1850s, we will (1) re-consider the authors we read in their historical and cultural contexts; (2) question the logic of dividing lines between centuries (18th century/19th century), nations (Great Britain/America), and literary traditions (British v. American “romanticism”); (3) explore some of the issues in bibliographic and textual studies that have influenced the production of literary texts; and (4) consider the ways in which Anglo-American romantic traditions have shaped our own experiences as readers of literature.
The reading in this course is presented, roughly, in chronological order—not by default, but so that we may think about what relationships chronology makes visible but may also obscure. We will consider what kind of history emerges when emphasis is placed not only on works that have “survived,” but additionally on what readers at a given historical moment actually read. We’ll begin our inquiry, then, in the first week of the course by thinking about the central organizing question for this course: What is literary history? Why study it? Then we’ll turn to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence—a collection of poems that did not become part of literary history until nearly a century after it was written. The rest of the reading in the course will offer us various ways to continue to think through that opening question. Following Songs, we turn to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems often said to signal the beginning of the British Romantic period (traditionally defined as the period between 1798 and 1830 or sometimes 1850). After Lyrical Ballads, we’ll read poems by selected women authors in England and America who, despite the fact that they were widely read at the time Lyrical Ballads was published, and experimented with some of the same forms and topics, have not traditionally been considered part of the “Romantic” canon. Next we’ll turn our attention to two “popular” works which have until recently been excluded from the modern canon because of their status as popular: Susannah Rowson’s trans-Atlantic best-seller Charlotte Temple and Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland. And, finally, through careful examination of a mid-century anthology (Griswold’s Prose Writers), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Douglass’ Narrative, we’ll spend the last part of the course considering how the discourse of Romanticism has (and has not) shaped efforts to organize and define 19th-century American literary traditions.
Students who successfully complete this course will:
- acquire an introductory understanding of the problems and possibilities inherent in the study of “literary history.”
- reflect on the cultural function of literary canons and their process of construction.
- acquire an introductory understanding of Anglo-American Romantic traditions.
- learn how to identify and analyze romantic “commonplaces” as they appear in a range of late 18th and early 19th-century texts.
- learn how to describe and analyze the influence of romantic “commonplaces” on the history of literature.
- explain and critique the difference between “literary history” and “the historicity of texts.”
- understand the role of Lafayette’s English Department in the study of literature
- compose a biographical profile of a Lafayette English professor for publication on the English Department website