Code 23184
Level of study Third/Final year
Credit value 20
Semester 1
Pre-requisite modules You must have completed at least two years of appropriate study in this discipline
Other pre-requisites Students will need to have had some experience of, and an interest in, writing of the Romantic period.
An anonymous volume of poetry was published in 1798: Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems. This volume, a collaboration between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is the starting point for this option. We will read in and around the Lyrical Ballads first printed in 1798, and the expanded Lyrical Ballads of 1800 and 1802, as well as branching out into the later careers of the two poets, looking at the earliest forms of Wordsworth’s Prelude and the poems written by Coleridge for Lyrical Ballads that were excluded from it. We will look, too, at the writing of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose Alfoxden and Grasmere journals record much of the genesis of Lyrical Ballads, and are significant literary texts in their own right. In studying the collection’s influence in shaping what we now know as Romanticism, we will across the module also investigate Romantic authorship, the Romantic self, and Romantic politics; and we will explore what it is that shapes the literary sense of writing over this period in its forms, its genres, and its meanings.