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Popular Romanticism - CES00006M

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  • Department: Centre for 18th Century Studies
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: M
  • Academic year of delivery: 2023-24

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 2 2023-24

Module aims

  • to introduce students to the rise of popular and especially popular radical politics
  • to explore literary responses to the growth of popular reading audiences, in the context of the expansion of the infrastructure for mass culture (publishing, transport, commerce, consumption)
  • to introduce students to the skills and techniques of interdisciplinary research

Module learning outcomes

Subject content

  • student should acquire an overall sense of the varieties of radical expression in print
  • an awareness of the varieties of literature aimed for consumption by 'the people'
  • an understanding of some of the implications of wider audiences for the development of literary forms
  • an understanding of the sensational impact of Radcliffe, Scott, Byron and others.

Academic and graduate skills

  • the research skills to elucidate texts in relation to changing notions of the popular
  • some grasp of the range of print cultures in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain

Indicative assessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Module feedback

Written feedback, given in Week 5 for original assessment, and within two weeks of submission for re-assessed work

Indicative reading

An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman et. al.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, ed. Andrew Lincoln. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Eric Foner. Penguin Classics, 1985

Hannah More, Tales for the Common People and Other Cheap Repository Tracts, ed. Claire McDonald Shaw. Trent Editions, 2002

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Broadview, 2008

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree and Terry Castle. Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008

Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess.

Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008.

Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996) and Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832 (Cambridge, 2007), James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds, Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 2005).



The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University constantly explores ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary. In some instances it may be appropriate for the University to notify and consult with affected students about module changes in accordance with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.