English Literature Exam Syllabus with answers. Full answers on the exam questions for attending and non-attending students. The document include lecture notes and brief summaries of the chapters of professor's book. Among the most important topics are: perspectives of the romantic period, later rom...
During the oral exam students will be expected to discuss the following topics:
1. New Perspectives on the Romantic Period – lecture notes and three chapters to be chosen from
within either of these books:
D. Saglia, Modernità del romanticismo: scrittura e cambiamento nella letteratura britannica
1780-1830 (Marsilio 2023)
The relationships between contemporaneity and the Age of Enlightenment or Romanticism are controversial.
romanticism as a condition of the spirit, a manifestation of thought is invoked as a founding phase of
contemporary experiences and forms. invoking romanticism as the point of origin of the present leads to a
problematically split vision. on the one hand the conception of an inseparable link between contemporaneity
and its romantic past, on the other the ideas overcoming this past is an indispensable step for the
manifestation of the contemporary. romanticism counts as a concluded experience; its current relevance lies
in being part of those reservoirs of epistemes destined for an omnipresent “post” prefix starting or looming
over the present. De Man strongly points out the need for a critical rethinking of the modern category aimed
at outlining “the larger movement that contains the modernism of the early 20th century as a moment in its
growth. The problem of any definition of modernity is therefore inherent in the desire to identify its
relational nature and consequently its doubly synchronic and diachronic temporality. since proclamations of
modernity are never neutral or innocent. the problematic relationship between modernist innovation and the
Romanesque period should make us reflect. the introduction identifies in romanticism the inaugural moment
of a new and more penetrating way of knowledge and then detects in the culture of the end of the 900, a
dialectic of closeness and distance with romanticism with its set of ideologies of foresights, of revolts, of
utopias, of evasion which constitute the stigmata of modernity. for Sergio Givone the romantic age which is
a romantic climate, a plot of religious, aesthetic, and artistic philosophical ideas and principles, marks the
point of no return of modernity. and this is essential to reconsider the departure species of the modern
relevance of the romantic phenomenon as part of an age of transition and transformation and therefore of
configuration of a modernity that influences subsequent modernities including ours. this study focuses on the
Romantic Age in Britain for the exemplary value of its own characteristics as well as for its transnational
impact. William Warner: The romantic climate is the effect of a series of transformations caused by a change
in the form of communication and mediation whose origin can be found in the Age of Enlightenment. “if
enlightenment is an event, romanticism is an eventuality.” The romantic age in the cultural history of Great
Britain spanned between an 18th century brimming with new developments and a vibrant and articulated
Victorian age. the romantic one is a tumultuous, upsetting and upsetting phase made up of multiple and rapid
transformations. it cannot be fully subsumed into either the long 18th century or a long 19th century. The
period between the years 1780 and 1830 is the site of profound and radical changes in the historical, socio-
political, economic, technological, scientific, and cultural fields that make the place and time of a specific
modernity. In these decades the idea of emancipation of women's slaves and of religious and discriminated
groups comes forward forcefully as an indispensable socio-cultural and political instance in the works of
feminism product. the traces of disciplines emerge such as political economy, expansion of the commercial
traffic network. the concept of nation takes shape in ever clearer and more structured forms, dynamic
conceptions of the relationship between past and present. the authors of the English romantic era transmit to
other Western and non-Western traditions a range of forms mythical themes and texts endowed with an
incalculable imaginative charge. James Chandler: “Evidence – both qualitative and quantitative – of this
peculiar intensity in the writing of the romantic period is not hard to find.” A flowering which corresponds to
an accelerated development of the literary market and public. the period then deserves a very special
attention also for the Geo-cultural collocation of the British culture, a close dialogue with the other present
,and past European cultures, while at the same time the English-speaking culture begins to project itself
successfully on the international scene. In the Birth of the Modern Paul Johnson fixes the beginning of
modernity in the transition decades between 1815 and 1830, since it is in them that “the matrix of the modern
world was largely formed.” An idea of modernity as a way of knowing, being, and acting underlies Peter
Wagner's suggested definition. according to which the modern is associated in the political field with the
affirmation of instances of freedom and emancipation in the economy of capitalism. “Modernity is a way in
which human beings conceive of theory lives. It needs to address the questions of how to govern life in
common, how to satisfy human needs and how to establish valid knowledge.” For Wagner, the modernity
closest to us begins to take shape in the decades of the romantic turning point: the idea of "open Horizon of
the future, with unending progress towards a better human condition brought about by radically novel
institutional arrangement" manifests itself precisely in the decades around 1800. being modern and therefore
being in a context "that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the
world", but which at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know and
everything we are. British literature between 700 and 800 - context of emergence and consolidation of a
modernity that is a conflictual space. modernity has “several beginnings, several endings”. Plot and drawings
that capture these changes, literature outlines and filters them through its figurative processes but itself
inexorably modified by these changes starting from its most immediately material components. the latter and
can in fact of absolute centrality in the Romantic era in Great Britain, where new printing technologies are
introduced, new literary markets emerge, communications improve and the process of distribution of cultural
products accelerates. romanticism must therefore be included in a romantic age which is not only an area of
literary and artistic procedures and aesthetic categories, but also a bundle of identity and epistemological
issues including the self, feeling, passion and the unconscious, nature, imagination, the shift from allegory to
symbol characterizing and other components. Prohibition to think the romantic age is destined to remain
unfinished precisely because of the very nature of the modernity that pervades it, which, to resume Mesonic,
is "indefinitely nascen- постоянно рождающаясяt". The purpose of this selection is really to focus on
representative examples of some of the innumerable ways and forms with which the literature of the
romantic age shapes and spreads its modernity. The value of romanticism lies not in itself but in its posterior
influence, that the literature of the romantic age still has the ability to speak to us in surprising modernity.
romanticism – the term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18 th
century and the first decades of 19 th century. BUT there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the
time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von
Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic”
qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers
thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 “a
new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The world’s great age
begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats,
referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of
freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavor. As that ideal
swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable
feature of the poetry of that time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main
trend of 18th-century poetics was to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing
a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics
found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience." Romantic writing was its shift from the
mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet
a godlike being.
, Poetry
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their
feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been
dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of
contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a
world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the
Moon (1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of
Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a
momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of
Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the
dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of
the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there,
was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For
the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be
faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity
as a whole. The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise
of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause.
The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective
by the Napoleonic Wars) and were able to learn from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley was deeply
interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardor caused him to claim in his
critical essay “A Defence of Poetry” (published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry,”
and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at one with
them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics. Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early
poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of
sensibility and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a poetry of dash and
flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18)
and Don Juan (1819–24), his masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter
and melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series
of amorous adventures.
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen
Flourishing as a form of entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel underwent several important
developments in this period. One was the invention of the Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a
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