English

Venice today is a manifestation of Romanticism’s continuing influence on modern-day culture: Romantic-period literature transformed the city from an almost forgotten backwater into the iconic city of modern tourism. This course is focused on the international re-imagining of Venice by Romantic-period writers such as Goethe, Radcliffe, de Staël, Byron and P. B. Shelley, and the influence of this re-imagining across Europe and beyond. However, this international focus on "Romantic Venice" also enables students to re-think Romanticism in Britain, in terms of its inherently international nature and its international impact. It does this by foregrounding Romanticism’s interest in urban as well as natural worlds; its reinvention of literary genres to address new aesthetic, social, and political objectives; the importance of writers (especially women writers), and kinds of writing (especially travel writing), often marginalized in scholarly accounts of Romanticism; and the influence of "Romantic Venice" on writers such as Dickens, George Sand, and Henry James.

This course uses the framing concept of "metamorphosis" to explore the ways in which late medieval poets creatively reworked and re-imagined classical stories dealing with change, loss, and violence, while working out new modes of poetic representation and form. Many of these stories were taken from the works of that most popular of Roman poets in the Middle Ages, Ovid (predominantly from the Metamorphoses). Engaging with these narratives allowed medieval authors to confront and explore questions of transformation and change in language and forms that were themselves often innovative and experimental. It also required them to think about how to engage with the writings of a pagan poet within their own, Christian context. The course introduces students to selected stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and to reworkings of them by late medieval authors such as John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and Robert Henryson.

The origins of this rich and complicated genre lie in the Middle Ages, when romance was the most popular form of secular literature and the particular narrative form in which women characters developed agency and subjectivity. Medieval romance has a profound influence on later literature, and, as students explore, on the novel, making it one of the most important genres to English literary history. Despite this, romance is a peculiarly discredited genre – a bit of an embarrassment to write, and to be seen reading. The course asks why the discrediting of romance in later periods is bound up with its association with women readers, and, indeed, with women writers. This course introduces students to the history of romance, to feminist scholarship on it, as well as to a history of women as readers and writers, and the ways in which male writers thought about and adapted a genre that was assumed to be feminine.

From the 1960s, British and North American publishing industries started to undergo a process known as conglomeration, a form of financialization that increasingly held publishers accountable to producing books that would make near-immediate profit rather than incentivizing editors to pursue work that might amass reputation and financial returns over time. In this course students examine the narrative of conglomeration amidst other developments in literary publishing and editorial politics during this time, covering topics including: commercial and independent presses; feminist publishing; under representation of POC authors; the relationship between publishing and political movements; the poetics of editing; the outsourcing of work to the Global South; and self-publishing. Throughout the course, students remain attuned to questions of literary form and the politics of editing and publishing.