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FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
M.St./M.Phil. English Course Details 2017-18 Further programme information is available in the M.St./M.Phil. Handbook v6
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Contents Introduction To The M.St. In English Literature By Period, English and American and the M.St. in World Literatures in English 4 A-Course: Literature, Contexts and Approaches 4 B-Course: Research Skills 4 C-Course: Special Options 4 Assessment 5 Dissertation 5 Introduction To The M.Phil. In English (Medieval Studies) 6 Second Year Assessment 6 Strand-Specific Course Descriptions 7 M.St. In English, 650-1550 / First Year M.Phil. 7 A-Course (Professor Andy Orchard and Dr Laura Ashe) 7 B-Course: Course in Transcription, Palaeography, Codicology and the History of the Book 16 M.St. In English Literature, 1550-1700 17 A–Course: Literature: Contexts and Approaches, 1550-1700 17 B-Course: Material Texts – Michaelmas Term - 1550-1700 24 Hilary Term B-Course: Early Modern Textual Cultures: Writing, Circulating, Reading 28 M.St. in English Literature, 1700-1830 32 A-Course – 1700-1830 - Michaelmas Term 32 B-Course Material Texts - 1700-1830 - Michaelmas Term 34 B-Course - Textual Cultures 1700-1830 - Hilary Term 36 M.St. in English Literature, 1830-1914 37 A - Course – Michaelmas Term 37 B Course: Material Texts, 1830–1914 - Michaelmas Term 39 B Course: Bibliography, Theories of Text, History of the Book, Manuscript Studies 1830–1914 – Hilary Term 41 M.St. in English Literature, 1900-Present 43 A-Course – Literature, Context and Approaches 43 B Course: 1900-present - Michaelmas Term 48 Hilary Term B-Course 48 M.St. in English and American Studies 49 M.St. in World Literatures In English 55 B-Course 60 B-Course, Post-1550 62 Material Texts Post-1900 Michaelmas Term 64 B-Course: Post-1550 Transcription Classes Michaelmas Term 67
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M.St. Strands post-1550 - (optional) 68 C-Course Descriptions - Michaelmas Term 71 Placing Chaucer 71 After The Conquest: Reinventing Fiction and History 74 The Age of Alfred 82 Shakespeare, History and Politics 93 Milton and the Philosophers 103 Documents of Theatre History 109 The Philosophical Poem: Pope, Wordsworth and Tennyson 115 Anglo-Italian Romantic Poetry 118 Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism and the Fin de Siècle 119 Writing the City 123 Trollope 126 Late Modernist Poetry in Britain and America 128 Fiction in Britain since 1945 – History, Time and Memory 130 Post-Colonial Literary Cities 136 Prison Writing and the Literary World 138 The Black Atlantic in the 1980s 141 C-Course Descriptions: Hilary Term 142 ‘Seeking into Beholding’: Ways of Reading Julian of Norwich 142 The Pearl Poet 145 Old Norse 146 The Supernatural in Early Modern Literature 147 The Lettered World 150 The Forensic Imagination 152 Transformation of the Epic from Milton to Byron 155 Objects as Subjects in 18th Century Literature 159 Dickens the Novelist 162 Victorian Drama 164 High Modernism and Children’s Literature 166 Contemporary Poetry 171 Modernism and Philosophy 175 Empire and Nation 177 African Literature 180 American Fiction Since 2000 183 Life Writing 188
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Introduction To The M.St. In English Literature By Period, English and American and the M.St. in World Literatures in English
The course consists of four components, outlined briefly below; for further detail, you should consult the strand-specific descriptions. The M.St./M.Phil. Handbook will be circulated before the beginning of term and will provide further important information needed once you begin your course.
A-Course: Literature, Contexts and Approaches
For all strands other than 650-1550 (for details of which please see page 7), this will consist of 8 weeks of 2-hour classes, taught in Michaelmas Term. In every strand, attendance is compulsory. There is no formal assessment, but written work and/or oral presentations may be required. A student-led all-day conference will be held in Trinity Term (usually in the fourth week) at which all students will give brief papers on topics arising from their dissertation work, and will receive feedback from the course convenor(s).
B-Course: Research Skills
The B-Course is a compulsory component of the course. It provides a thorough foundation in the skills needed to undertake research. The B-Course for the 650-1550 strand is described in the ‘Strand Specific Course Descriptions’ section of this booklet.
Post 1550; English and American; World Literatures strand In Michaelmas, the B-Course is divided into four subcourses: 1550-1700, 1700-1830, 1830-1914, and post-1900, all of which are described in detail later in this booklet. Students should select the B- Course that best fits the period-based or thematic strand of the M.St. into which they have been accepted, or which best suits their research interests. Strand specific classes on manuscript transcription and palaeography are taught in Michaelmas Term; formal assessment of this element of the B-Course takes the form of class tests. This assessment is pass/fail, and while students must pass in order to proceed with the course, scores on the test will not affect their final degree result. Further details about the examination of the B-Course are provided later in this booklet and in the M.St./M.Phil. Handbook. In Hilary, students take their strand’s specific B-Course, which is described in the ‘Strand Specific Course Descriptions’ section of this booklet.
Further details about the structure of the B-Course for all strands can be found on page 56.
C-Course: Special Options
These will be taught as 2-hour classes in weeks 1-6 of Michaelmas and Hilary Term. Students must choose one of these options in each term. All C-course options are open to students in all strands. Students must register their preferred options by 15 September 2017 by email. You will need to list three preferences for each term. The Faculty reserves the right not to run a Special Options C-Course if there are insufficient numbers enrolled or should a tutor become unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances; please bear this in mind when selecting your options. Students cannot assume that they will be enrolled in their first choice of option; please also bear this in mind.
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Remember that you can select any C-Course(s), depending on your interests and research plans.
Assessment
In Michaelmas Term candidates will be required to submit an essay of 6,000-7,000 words on a topic related to a C-Course studied in that term.
In Hilary Term, candidates will be required to submit 2 essays of 6,000-7,000 words, one on a topic related to the C-Course studied in that term, and another on a topic related to the B-Course.
Details on approval of topics and on the timing of submission for all components are found in the M.St. /M.Phil. Handbook.
Please note: If you wish to change any of your options, you must first contact the Graduate Studies Office who will seek approval from your convenor and the tutor for the course you wish to take. Requests for option changes for Hilary Term must be submitted by the end of week 4 of Michaelmas Term. We do not accept any changes after this time. Please note that undersubscribed Hilary term courses may be withdrawn before the start of Michaelmas term.
Dissertation
Each student will write a 10-11,000-word dissertation on a subject to be defined in consultation with the strand convenors, written under the supervision of a specialist in the Faculty, and submitted for examination at the end of Trinity Term.
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Introduction To The M.Phil. In English (Medieval Studies)
In their first year candidates for the M.Phil. in English (Medieval Studies) follow the same course as the M.St. in English (650-1550) students. Provided they achieve a pass mark in the first-year assessments, students may proceed to the second year. In the second year candidates must offer three of the following subjects and a dissertation: 1. The History of the Book in Britain before 1550 (Candidates will be required to transcribe from, and comment on specimens written in English in a 1-hour examination) 2. Old English 3. The Literature of England after the Norman Conquest 4. The Medieval Drama 5. Religious Writing in the Later Middle Ages 6. Medieval Romance 7. Old Norse sagas 8. Old Norse poetry 9. Old Norse special topic (only to be taken by candidates offering either option 7 or 8, or both) 10./11. One or two of the C-Course Special Options as on offer in any strand, as specified by the M.St. English for the year concerned; candidates may not re-take any option for which they have been examined as part of their first year. 12./13./14./15. Relevant options offered by other Faculties as agreed with the M.Phil. Convenors. The teaching and assessment of these options will follow the provisions and requirements as set by the Faculty offering the option.
Second Year Assessment
Students will be required to submit an essay of 6,000-7,000 in Michaelmas Term or Hilary Term (depending on the term in which the course was offered).
Students will write a dissertation of no 13-15,000 words on a subject related to their subject of study.
Each candidate’s choice of subjects shall require the approval the Chairman of the M.St./M.Phil. Examiners, care of the Graduate Studies Office. Details on approval of topics and timing of submission for all components are found in the M.St. /M.Phil. Handbook.
Candidates are warned that they must avoid duplicating in their answers to one part of the examination material that they have used in another part of the examination, but the dissertation may incorporate work submitted for the first-year dissertation.
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Strand-Specific Course Descriptions
M.St. In English, 650-1550 / First Year M.Phil.
Convenors: Dr Laura Ashe ([email protected]) Professor Andy Orchard ([email protected])
This Outline describes the one-year M.St. course, and also the first year of the two-year M.Phil. course. You must attend the A-Course in Michaelmas and Hilary term, the appropriate B-Course in Michaelmas and Hilary Term and your chosen C-Courses in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms. The A- Course is not examined, but you will be asked to give a class presentation within it. From the B- and C-Courses you must, in due course, select three topics on which to be assessed. Two of these will be from your C-Courses. Also compulsory is the dissertation in Section D.
A-Course (Professor Andy Orchard and Dr Laura Ashe)
Michaelmas Term Programme
This M.St. A-course is designed to give you an introduction to key works, textual witnesses, concepts, and critical debates in the 650–1550 period. In Michaelmas Term the topics will be covered in two-week sessions, with a primary focus each week on Old or Middle English, as set out below. You will be asked to read in advance some primary texts and secondary works and to think through particular questions and issues. You will be encouraged to suggest texts for discussion. The class may take the form of presentations from students with discussion to follow, and/or roundtable debate about key texts and ideas. The course will continue in Hilary Term with a focus on particular areas of analysis and debate, adapting to the needs and interests of the group. You are not expected to read everything on this list: details of the reading will be confirmed in conversation with the group as each term progresses. The key texts to use for preparation are the primary texts for each seminar. Other valuable preparation would be to familiarize yourself with some fundamental works that are influential for this period, if you have not encountered them already, eg.: Virgil, Aeneid; the Bible; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Beowulf; Egils Saga; Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales; Thomas More, Utopia.
Michaelmas Term
WEEKS 1–2 ANTHOLOGY OR MISCELLANY?
Week 1: The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry The main focus will be on what this manuscript, and the collection in it, can tell us about the composition, writing and reading of poetry in the Anglo-Saxon period.
Facsimiles The Exeter Book of OE Poetry, ed. Chambers et al. (1933) The Electronic Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, ed. Muir and Kennedy (2006)
Editions of all the texts in the Exeter Book The Exeter Book, ed. Krapp and Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) 3 (1936) The Exeter Book, Part I, ed. Gollancz, Early English Text Society (EETS) original series (o.s.) 104 (1895), Part II, ed. Mackie, EETS o.s. 194 (1934) [with facing translation]
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The Exeter Anthology of OE Poetry, ed. B.J. Muir, 2nd rev. ed. (2000) Most of the poems are transl. in S.A.J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982, several reprints)
Edition of so-called elegies, several of them from the Exeter Book Anne Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (1992) [review by James R. Earl, Speculum 69 (1994): http://www.jstor.org/stable/2865658?seq=3 ]
Studies of the manuscript and its origins Patrick Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter (1993), esp. ch. 6 [controversial thesis, mostly not accepted (eg. review by Gameson in Notes and Queries 42 (1995), and comments in Exeter Anthology, ed. Muir), but worth reading the arguments] Richard Gameson, ‘The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, Anglo-Saxon England (ASE) 25 (1996), 135–85 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song (1990), ch. 7 Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (1995), esp. ch. 2 John C. Pope, ‘Palaeography and Poetry: Some Solved and Unsolved Problems of the Exeter Book’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries, ed. Parkes and Watson (1978) Mary P. Richards, ed., Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings (1994), esp. essays by Rumble, Robinson, Conner [reprints of influential or provocative essays] Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Exeter Book’, in his Studies in the History of OE Literature (1953) On particular texts or groups of texts Riddles: J. Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (2006); Fred C. Robinson, ‘Artful Ambiguities in the Old English “Book-Moth” Riddle’, in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. Nicholson and Frese (1975), pp 355–62; Nicholas Howe, ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Boyarin (1993), pp. 58–79, repr. in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Liuzza (2002), pp. 1– 22; Seth Lerer, ‘The Riddle and the Book: Exeter Book Riddle 42 in its Contexts’, Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989), 3–18
Elegies: T.A. Shippey, Old English Verse (1972), ch. 3: ‘Wisdom and experience: the Old English elegies’; or Christine Fell, ‘Perceptions of transience’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Godden and Lapidge (1991; new edn 2013); Robert E. Bjork, ‘Sundor æt Rune: The Voluntary Exile of The Wanderer’, Neophilologus 73 (1989), 119–29, repr. in Old English Literature, ed. Liuzza, pp. 315–27. See also Malcolm Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies presented to Peter Clemoes, ed. Lapidge and Gneuss (1985), pp. 271-98; repr. in Old English Literature, ed. Liuzza, pp. 284–314; and Leslie Lockett, Anglo- Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (2011), esp. Introduction. Thomas Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (2009) Peter Orton, The Transmission of Old English Verse (2002)
On monastic history generally David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols (CUP, 1948–59); and various other books, incl. Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (Longman: rev. edn, 1971) The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism, ed. James G. Clark (Boydell Press, 2007) Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (SPCK, 3rd edn, 1982) Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–900 (CUP, 2006)
Week 2: British Library MS Harley 2253 and the Harley Lyrics Facsimile N.R. Ker, Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253, EETS o.s. 255 (1965) See also the British Library page for this MS for some pictures and references
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Editions Wessex Parallel Web Texts electronic edn by Bella Millett of selected Harley Lyrics The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of MS. Harley 2253, ed. G.L. Brook (1956, 4th edn 1968) [standard edn of the English poems, though lacks the political lyrics] English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (1932) [incl. some Harley texts] The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. Thomas Wright, Camden Society (1839) [incl. political lyrics from the Harley MS]
Studies Studies in the Harley Manuscript, ed. Fein (2000), esp. Corrie, Revard, and Stemmler Carter Revard, ‘Oppositional Thematics and Metanarrative in MS Harley 2253, Quires 1-6’, Essays in Manuscript Geography, ed. Scase (2007), pp. 95–112 Susanna Fein, ‘Compilation and Purpose in MS Harley 2253’, in ibid., pp. 67–94 The Whole Book, ed. Nichols and Wenzel (1996) Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): special issue on miscellany/anthology Kathryn Kerby-Fulton et al., Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts (2012), pp. 45–55
J.A. Burrow, ‘Poems Without Contexts: the Rawlinson Lyrics’, Essays in Criticism 29 (1979), 6–32; repr. J.A. Burrow, Essays in Medieval Literature (1984: accessible in Oxford via Oxford Scholarship Online) [Not on Harley, but influential paradigm] Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (2007) Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Three Languages’, in his England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (1996) Jane Taylor, The Making of Poetry: Late Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (2007) J. Hines, Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (2004), ch. 3 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan- Browne et al. (1999) [on vernacularity] Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–1500 (2009) [multilingual context] The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1 [medieval], ed. Roger Ellis (2008) Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013)
WEEKS 3–4: SPEECH, MANUSCRIPT AND PRINT
Week 3: Bede and Cædmon
Facsimiles The Leningrad Bede, ed O. Arngart, Early English MSS in Facsimile (EEMF) 2 (1952) The Moore Bede, ed P. Hunter Blair, EEMF 9 (1959) The Tanner Bede: the Old English version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. J. Bately, EEMF 24 (1992) [Leningrad and Moore Bedes contain the Latin text, with Caedmon’s Hymn added in the margin or at the end; the Tanner Bede is the OE translation of Bede with Caedmon’s Hymn embedded in the text.]
Editions and translations Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed./trans. Colgrave and Mynors (1969) [also transl. in Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics] The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed./trans. T.A. Miller, EETS o.s. 95–6 (1890–1) Caedmon’s Hymn: A Multi-Media Edition, ed. Daniel Paul O’Donnell (2005) [associated CD-ROM incl. facsimiles of the relevant pages from all the MSS] OE Bede’s story of Caedmon also in student readers, eg. Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to Old
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English, or Treharne, An Anthology of Old and Middle English Studies George Molyneaux, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1289–1323 Kevin Kiernan, ‘Reading Cædmon’s Hymn with Someone Else’s Glosses‘, Representations 32 (1990); repr. in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Liuzza (2002) Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (1991), ch. 2 Francis P. Magoun, ‘Bede’s Story of Cædmon: the Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer’, Speculum 30 (1955) [classic attempt to use early oral-formulaic theory on OE] Andy Orchard, ‘Poetic Inspiration and Prosaic Translation: The Making of Cædmon’s Hymn,’ in Studies in English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely, ed. Toswell and Tyler (1996), pp. 402–22
Bede and history classic article is Roger Ray, ‘Bede’s Vera Lex Historiae’, Speculum 55 (1980), 1–21. Influential but perhaps dated study by Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (CUP: rev. edn, 1990). Recent Cambridge Companion to Bede worth checking. Often good things in the series of Jarrow Lectures, eg. Bede and his World: The Jarrow Lectures, 1958–1993 (Variorum, 1994), and search on SOLO for ongoing Jarrow Lectures, published as pamphlets, eg. N.J. Higham, ‘Bede as an Oral Historian’ (2011).
Approaches to orality and literacy Oral Tradition 24:2 (2009); incl. essays by Jones, Orchard Andy Orchard, ‘Oral Tradition’, in Reading Old English Texts, ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe (1997), pp. 101–23 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (1992) Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song (1990), ch. 2 Medieval Oral Literature, ed. Karl Reichl (2012) Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1987) [on later period but important ideas] M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (1979; 2nd edn 1993; 3rd edn 2012). [If possible, read Clanchy’s updated postscript to 2012 edn] Nicholas Perkins, ‘Writing, Authority, and Bureaucracy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. Treharne and Walker (2010), pp. 68–89
Week 4: Malory’s Morte Darthur: the Winchester Manuscript and early print editions
Facsimiles Facsimile of the Winchester Manuscript: ed. N. Ker, EETS s.s. 4 (1976) Facsimile of Caxton’s print: Le Morte D’Arthur, intro. Paul Needham (1976); also on Early English Books Online, along with Wynkyn de Worde’s 1498 print See also Digital Malory Project for pages from the Winchester MS and Caxton’s edn
Editions Le Morte Darthur, ed. P.J.C. Field, 2 vols (2013); previous standard text is Malory’s Works, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols (1973, rev. Field, 1990); also convenient 1-vol. edn by Vinaver (1971): mainly from Winchester MS, but sometimes collates with Caxton, and indicates Caxton’s book divisions. 2-vol. modern spelling Penguin edition by J. Cowen (1969) based on Caxton. Norton Critical Edition by S.H.A. Shepherd (2004) is based on the MS and attempts to reproduce its rubrication; also has. useful sources and contextual material.
Studies Joyce Coleman, ‘Reading Malory in the Fifteenth Century: Aural Reception and Performance
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Dynamics’, Arthuriana 13 (2003), 48–70 Helen Cooper, ‘Opening up the Malory Manuscript’, in The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur (2000), ed. Wheeler et al. (2000) [see other essays too] D. Thomas Hanks, ‘Textual Harassment: Caxton, de Worde, and Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in Re- viewing Le Morte Darthur, ed. Whetter and Radulescu (2005) A Companion to Malory, ed. Archibald and Edwards (1996) [starting point for Malory] Takako Kato, Caxton’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’: The Printing Process and the Authenticity of the Text (2002) Andrew Taylor, ‘Into his Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. Raven et al. (1996), pp. 41–61 Julia Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London, c.1475–1530 (2012) Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (1974). Also Antonia Gransden’s work, which is still important.
On different/changing understandings of truth and Middle English trawthe, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (1999) On the problematic idea of ‘character’ esp. in romance, see Tony (A.C.) Spearing, Textual Subjectivity (2005). Also much earlier than this, the work of Derek Brewer, eg. Symbolic Stories (repr. Longman, 1988) and Jill Mann, eg. the short, brilliant essay ‘Malory: Knightly Combat in Le Morte D’Arthur’, in Medieval Literature, part one: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition, ed. Boris Ford, New Pelican Guide to English Literature (Penguin, 1982).
WEEKS 5–6 AUTHORS, TEXTS AND AUDIENCES
Week 5: Authorship and revising the text: Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
Texts Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (1994) Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (1939, rev. 1976); The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum (1957) [three versions of Sermo Lupi, as Homly 20]; A Wulfstan Manuscript, ed. Loyn, EEMF 17 (1971) [MS Cotton Nero A. I]; translated eg. in Whitelock, EHD I; Swanton, A-S Prose; parallel text edition in Treharne, Old and Middle English
Studies Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Anglo-Saxon Textual Attitudes’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 2. The Middle Ages, ed. Minnis and Johnson (2005), pp. 310–23 Stephanie Dien, ‘Sermo Lupi ad Anglos: the order and date of the three versions’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 64 (1975), 561–70 Stephanie Hollis, ‘The Thematic Structure of the Sermo Lupi’, ASE 6 (1977), 175–95; repr. in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Liuzza (2002), pp. 182–203 Andy Orchard, ‘Crying Wolf: Oral Style and the Sermones Lupi’, Anglo-Saxon England 21 (1992), 239–64 Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference, ed. Townend (2004)
Week 6: Author(s) and audience(s): East Anglian Drama
Texts The Croxton Play of the Sacrament , ed. John T. Sebastian (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications 2012) http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/sjcpsfr.htm Mankind either in Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, ed. G.A.Lester (New Mermaids, 1981), or in Everyman and Mankind, ed. Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen (Arden Modern Drama, 2009)
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Studies Atkin, Tamara. “Playbooks and Printed Drama: A Reassessment of the Date and Layout of the Manuscript of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Review of English Studies 60 (2009), 194–205. Beadle, Richard, ‘Monk Thomas Hyngham’s hand in the Macro manuscript’ in Richard Beadle and A.J.Piper (eds), New Science out of Old Books: Studies in manuscripts and early printed Books in honour of A.I.Doyle (Aldershot, 1995), 315-41. Beckwith, Sarah. “Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body.” In Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (1992), pp. 65–89. Brantley, Jessica and Thomas Fulton, ‘Mankind in a year without kings’, JMEMS, 36 (2006), 321-54). Clopper, Lawrence, M. ‘Mankind and its audience’ Comparative Drama, 8 (1974), 347-55. Dox, Donnalee. “.Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” in Medieval Practices of Space. Ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (2000). Krummel, Mariamne Ara, ‘Getting Even: Social Control and Uneasy Laughter in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’ in Medieval English Comedy, ed Hordis and Hardwick (2007), 171-93 Lawton, David A, ‘Sacrilege and Theatricality: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament.’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33:2 (2003), 281-309 Marshall, John, ‘”O ye souerrens that sutt and ye brothern that stoned right wppe’: addressing the audience of Mankind’, EMD, 1 (1996), 105-19 McMurray Gibson, Gail, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama in the late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Hilary Term Programme
WEEKS 1-2: LITERARY FORM AND GENRE
Week 1
Texts to include passages from: Beowulf Andreas Wulf & Eadwacer The Wife’s Lament Riddles
Initial Studies N.F. Blake, ‘The Literary Language’ in The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume II, ed. Blake (1992), pp. 500–41 A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Bjork and Niles (1997), chs 4, 5 and 6 Daniel Donoghue, ‘Language matters’, in Reading OE Texts, ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe (1997) Malcolm Godden, ‘Literary Language’ in The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume I, ed. Hogg, (1992), pp. 490–535 G.A. Lester, The Language of Old and Middle English Poetry (1996) Andy Orchard, ‘The Originality of Andreas’, in Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk, ed. Leonard Neidorf, Rafael J. Pascual, and Tom Shippey (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer: 2016), pp. 331–70 Andy Orchard, ‘Old English and Anglo-Latin: the Odd Couple’, in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, volume 1: the Medieval Period, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr, Hesook Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), pp. 273–92
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Andy Orchard, ‘Enigma Variations: the Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Tradition’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), I, 284–304 Fred C. Robinson, ‘Beowulf’ and the Appositive Style (1985)
Week 2
Texts The Song of Roland Roman d’Eneas Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, the Knight with the Lion Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde Wyatt, Songs & sonnets
Initial Studies Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (2007), ch. 3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953), ‘Roland and Ganelon’ and ‘The Knight Sets Forth’. John Frow, Genre (2006) Ardis Butterfield, ‘Medieval Genres and Modern Genre-Theory’, Paragraph 13 (1990), 184–201 A.C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry (1987) Folklore Genres, ed. Ben-Amos (1976) Paul Strohm, ‘Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives’, Speculum 46 (1971), 348–59 Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013), ch. 1 Gordon Braden, ‘Wyatt and Petrarch: Italian fashion at the court of Henry VIII’, in Petrarch and the European Lyric Tradition, ed. Dino S. Cervigni (2004), 237-65 Michael McCanles, ‘Love and Power in the Poetry of Thomas Wyatt’, Modern Language Quarterly 29 (1968), 145-60
WEEKS 3-4: HISTORY AND HISTORICISMS
Week 3
Texts Widsith Alfred’s Orosius Ælfric, Life of St Edmund Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
Initial studies Roberta Frank, ‘The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History’, in The Wisdom of Poetry, ed. Benson and Wenzel (1982), repr. in Heaney, Beowulf (2002) Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Tomb of Beowulf’, in his The Tomb of Beowulf and other Essays on Old English (1993), pp. 3–19, repr. in Heaney, Beowulf (2002) Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (2009), ch. 1 R.M. Liuzza, ‘Beowulf: Monuments, Memory, History’, in Readings in Medieval Texts, ed. Treharne and Johnson (2005), pp. 91–108 Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to ‘Beowulf’ (2003), ch. 3 Beowulf and its Scandinavian contexts [cf. G.N. Garmonsway and J. Simpson, ‘Beowulf’ and its Analogues (1968, repr. 1980)]
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Week 4
Texts Laȝamon, Brut Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng, Peter Langtoft, and the French/ME Brut, chronicles of Arthur, Havelok, & the thirteenth-century Barons’ Wars Thomas More, History of Richard III
Initial Studies W. R. J. Barron, ed., The Arthur of the English (rev. edn 2011) Julia Marvin, ‘John and Henry III in the Anglo-Norman prose Brut’, Thirteenth-Century England 14 (2013), 169-82 Thea Summerfield, ‘“Fi a debles,” quath the king: language-mixing in England's vernacular historical narratives, c. 1290 - c. 1340’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100 - c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2009), 68-80 Julia Marvin, ‘Havelok in the prose Brut tradition’, Studies in Philology 102 (2005), 280-306 Thea Summerfield, ‘The testimony of writing: Pierre de Langtoft and the appeals to history, 1291- 1306’, in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan (2005), 25-41 Rhonda Knight, ‘Stealing Stonehenge: Translation, Appropriation, and Cultural Identity in Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Chronicle’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002), 41-58 Alison Hanham, ‘Honing a history: Thomas More's revisions of his Richard III’, Review of English Studies n.s. 59 (2008), 197-218 Howard B. Norland, ‘More’s Re-creation of History in his Richard III’, Le Journal de la Renaissance 4 (2006), 189-98
WEEKS 5-6: NARRATIVE AND INTERTEXT
Week 5
Texts Gesta Herwardi Romance of Horn Elene and Judith Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle
Initial Studies John Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf’, University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967), 1–17; repr. in Heaney, Beowulf (2002) Andy Orchard, ‘Grettir and Hereward: Brothers from Another Mother?’, in New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, Islandica 58, ed. Jeff Turco (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2015), pp. 7–55 Andy Orchard, ‘Computing Cynewulf: the Judith-Connection’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, and Readers, ed. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 75–106 Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995) [pp viii + 352]; revised paperback edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, PBA 22 (1936), 245–95; repr. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, ed. Donoghue, Norton Critical Edn (2002) Reading OE Texts, ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe (1997): essays by Lapidge and Scragg Magnús Fjalldal, ‘Beowulf and the Old Norse Two-Troll Analogues’, Neophilogus 97 (2013), 541–53
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Week 6
Texts Griselda in the Decameron, Petrarch, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid Orpheus narratives, incl. Middle English Orfeo; Henryson, Orpheus and Eurydice; passages from versions of Ovid and Boethius
Initial Studies Richard Firth Green, ‘Why Marquis Walter treats his wife so badly’, Chaucer Review 47 (2012), 48-62 Richard Firth Green, ‘Griselda in Siena’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 3-38 Thomas J. Farrell, ‘How source study works: the sergeant in the Clerk's Tale’, Medieval Perspectives 18 (2011), 116-134 Lynn Shutters, ‘Griselda’s pagan virtue’, Chaucer Review 44 (2009), 61-83 [On the Clerk’s Tale and The Legend of Good Women] Marilynn R. Desmond, ‘The translatio of memory and desire in the Legend of Good Women: Chaucer and the vernacular Heroides’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013), 179-207 Betsy McCormick, ‘A feel for the game: Bourdieu, source study, and the Legend’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006), 257-61 Jamie C. Fumo, ‘Hating Criseyde: Last Words on a Heroine from Chaucer to Henryson’, Chaucer Review 46 (2011), 20-38 George Edmundson, ‘Henryson's doubt: neighbors and negation in The Testament of Cresseid’, Exemplaria 20:2 (2008), 165-96 John B. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (1970) Seth Lerer, ‘Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo’, Speculum 60 (1985), 92–109 R.M. Liuzza, ‘Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions, and the Poetics of Performance’, JMRS 21 (1991), 269–84
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B-Course: Course in Transcription, Palaeography, Codicology and the History of the Book Professor Daniel Wakelin ([email protected])
This course in palaeography, transcription, codicology and the history of the book will develop the scholarly skills essential for work in the medieval period and will introduce ways of thinking about the material form and transmission of texts. It will combine essential research skills with discussion of the uses made of such skills in research.
The course will be taught by thirty-six hour-long classes as follows: Michaelmas, weeks 1-6: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays 9.00-10.00, Fridays 11.00-12.00 Michaelmas, weeks 7-8, Hilary, weeks 1-4: Fridays 9.00-10.00, 11.00-12.00
There will also be one-to-one meetings to discuss coursework and informal visits to see manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. The course will be examined by a short test (assessed as simply as pass-fail) in transcription and palaeography on Monday of week 5 of Hilary term and then by an assessed coursework essay or editing project, submitted soon after the end of Hilary term. The test will have passages in Old English (650-1100), earlier Middle English (1100-1350) and later Middle English (1350-1550); students will have to transcribe and suggest a date for any two of the three. The coursework should show expertise in any aspect of the history of the book or textual transmission. While the classes will primarily focus on sources in English, it will be permissible to focus the coursework on materials in any language from, or brought to, the medieval British Isles.
There is no set book to buy; however, closer to the test many students find Jane Roberts, A Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (British Library, 2005; repr. Liverpool UP, 2011), useful for practice in transcription and palaeography. Those who seek a brief introduction to manuscript studies and their uses in literary, historical and art-historical scholarship might find interesting Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ed., Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (Exeter UP, 2009), and Kathryn Kerby- Fulton, Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts (Cornell UP, 2012).
The course assumes no prior knowledge of manuscript studies. Instead, the most useful preliminary work is to practise reading Old English and/or Middle English in the original languages and spelling. For convenience and variety of sources, it can be helpful to begin with anthologies such as Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, ed., A Guide to Old English, 8th edn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed., A Book of Middle English, 3rd edn (Wiley- Blackwell, 2013) or R.D. Fulk, ed., An Introduction to Middle English (Broadview, 2012). You need familiarity with the ‘look’ of these older varieties of English – likely spellings, likely words, likely content – as a preliminary to transcribing manuscripts. Students are welcome to e-mail Prof. Daniel Wakelin ([email protected]) for suggestions to suit their previous experience.
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M.St. In English Literature, 1550-1700
Convenors: Dr Kathryn Murphy ([email protected]) Professor Lorna Hutson ([email protected]
A–Course: Literature: Contexts and Approaches, 1550-1700
The class meets on Thursdays, 11.00am-1pm, in Seminar Room A, St Cross Building.
This course examines some key moments in the literary, cultural and political history of our period, showing means of exploring them in depth and ways in which they raise larger themes in current criticism. Naturally no such course can be comprehensive and we recognize that you will have widely varying backgrounds in the period; this course aims to help you to deepen your understanding and to orient you in the resources that will be necessary for your dissertation research. Each of you will be asked to present a brief position paper – not part of your formal assessment for the course - during one of the classes, with the aim of directing part of the discussion. We shall meet in the week before term begins to fix presentations for each week.
You should try to get as much reading as possible done in advance: the term is short and the summer is the time to get reading done, especially of long works like the Arcadia. Feel free to email the course convenors Kathryn Murphy ([email protected]) and Lorna Hutson ([email protected]) if you have any questions.
Week 1: Renaissance Subjects (Kathryn Murphy and Lorna Hutson) A handout of short critical extracts will be distributed at the pre-course meeting for this introductory seminar.
Week 2: Parrots, Pedants and Polyglottism (Kathryn Murphy)
John Florio, tutor in Italian and French, and the author of conversation manuals and translations of Montaigne and (probably) Boccaccio, wrote of English in 1578 that it was ‘a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. Ours is a period in which, despite its manifest literary richness, English was not a lingua franca, but marginal and isolated, not much understood by foreigners, still in the process of establishing its own rules for style, rhetoric, rhyme, and prosody, and measuring itself, often negatively, against Latin, Greek, Italian, French. It is also during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the English language underwent its widest expansion of vocabulary, in borrowings, calques, and coinages.
The purpose of this week’s class is to think about what this mean for the period’s literature; and also, pragmatically speaking, how we are to handle literature that is thick with quotations in other languages, puns on etymology, and a heightened awareness of literature as in dialogue with European and classical forebears. All of the learned men of the Renaissance, and many gentry women, were fluent in reading and writing in languages other than English. Latin was the foundation of education in grammar schools, of learning in general, and of instruction at the universities. Many would also have encountered Greek and even some Hebrew in this scholarly context, and a grounding in ancient literature – Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace – was the foundation of learning. At the same time, courtly life, education in gentry households, soldiery, mercantile exchange, diplomacy, the immigration of persecuted religious minorities from the Continent (e.g. Huguenots), travel, and the urge to read the literatures of other vernaculars, especially French, Italian, and Dutch, meant that some kind of
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proficiency in another language was very common, and that hearing and encountering other languages was normal.
We will approach this from three angles. First, we will look at how humanist practices of citation and commonplacing affected prose; secondly, at macaronism and opacity in poetry; and finally, at the representation of conversations between languages in dialogue and drama. At the beginning of the term I will also supply a handout with various visual materials, helping us see how polyglottism and linguistic difference were represented on the page.
Primary Reading:
1. John Skelton’s poem ‘Speke Parott’ (c.1521): read this in the Complete English Poems of John Skelton, ed. John Scattergood, rev. ed. (Liverpool, 2015), and use the notes.
2. Robert Burton, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621- 1651); read this in the Clarendon Edition, eds Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1989-2000), at least pp.1-20; more if you wish.
3. John Florio, First Fruites (London, 1578), 12v-19r, 49v-63r, 100r-v. (Read on EEBO: you can download the whole text by clicking the box beside the title after you have found it by searching, then going to your marked list, and downloading the pdf.
John Florio, Second Frutes (London, 1591), 127-139, 165-205. (Read on EEBO.)
William Shakespeare, Henry V, paying particular attention to the following scenes: III.ii, III.iv, IV.iv, V.ii
Secondary Reading:
(Everyone should read the asterisked suggestions; otherwise you are free to pursue whatever angle you find most interesting; it can also work as a more general, miscellaneous, and introductory guide to literature on linguistic questions in the period)
Bruce Boehrer, ‘“Men, Monkeys, Lap-dogs, Parrots, Perish All!” Psittacine Articulacy in Early Modern Writing’, Modern Languages Quarterly 59/2 (1998), 171-93 [for 1] **Ardis Butterfield, ‘National Histories’, in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, eds Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, 2011) [on Henry V] Anne Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2014) **-----, ‘Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation’ in Early Modern Cultures of Translation, ed. K. Newman and J. Tylus (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) John Considine, Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2017) Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013) [chapters on Spenser, Jonson, Donne, Milton] Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (eds), The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660 (Palgrave, 2015) Stuart Farley, ‘Opus musivum, opus variegatum: the mosaic form in early modern culture’, Renaissance Studies 31/1 (2017), 107-24 [useful for Burton] **John Gallagher, ‘The Italian London of John North: Cultural Contact and Linguistic Encounter in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 70 (2017), 88-131
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**Jane Griffith, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006) [sections on ‘Speke, Parott’] -----, ‘Having The Last Word: Manuscript, Print, and The Envoy in the Poetry of John Skelton’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Kathy Shrank (Oxford, 2012) Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford, 2003) Eric MacPhail, Dancing Around the Well: The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism (Leiden, 2014) [useful for Burton] Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London, 1997) [useful for macaronic poetry, and thinking about obscurity and learning] Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford, 2003) -----, ‘Being in Two Minds: The Bilingual Factor in Renaissance Writing’, in Acta Conventus Neo- Latini Hafniensis 1991 (Binghampton, NY, 1994), 61-74 Lucy Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge, 2013) **Jennifer Richards, ‘Commonplacing and Prose Writing: Robert Burton’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Prose, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford, 2013) Hugh Roberts, ‘Comparative Nonsense: French galimathias and English fustian’, Renaissance Studies 30/1 (2016), 102-19 [useful on learned nonsense, and Burton] Sarah Rivett, ‘Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: the Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly 71/4 (2014), 549-588 Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago, 2009) – not focused on the early modern, but interesting on linguistic obscurity and the languages of cant) Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge, 2005) [useful for Florio]
Week 3: ‘The Poetics of Fiction: Arcadia and after’ (Helen Moore)
Reading: Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. The title Arcadia is used of three different texts – the first, manuscript version (Old Arcadia); the unfinished revised version, published in 1590 (New Arcadia); and the compound version of the two published in 1593 which is the now hard-to-find Penguin edition by Maurice Evans.
Start with the ‘old’ Arcadia, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), Oxford World’s Classics (1994) and then, if you have time and access to a copy as this is a scholarly rather than paperback edition, the ‘new’ Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), Oxford, 1987
Sidney, The Defence of Poetry, available widely e.g. in Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (Penguin, 2004)
Margaret Tyler, Epistle to the Reader, from The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578), available in online digitisations of the original or in the MHRA edition by Joyce Boro (2014); reprinted in Randall Martin, ed., Women Writers in Renaissance England (Longman, 1997)
For an introduction to early modern fiction see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History (Oxford, 1985)
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Week 4: Drama on stage and page (Emma Smith)
Shakespeare, Hamlet. Please compare the play in the complete works Oxford edition edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with the 2-volume Arden 3 text edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Look at the Enfolded Hamlet (hamletworks.net) as well as the two quartos and the Folio text in a facsimile or online (http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html and http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk and http://quartos.org). Bring along any examples of any other noteworthy textual interventions you find.
* Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2nd ed, 2013): read the introduction and chapters 8 and 9 on Hamlet. Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the commonplacing of professional plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (via JSTOR) (2008) Zachary Lesser, Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (2014) Kirk Melnikoff, ‘Nicholas Ling’s Republican Hamlet (1603)’ in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography ed Maria Straznicky (2012) *Andrew Sofer ‘Dropping the Subject: the skull on the Jacobean Stage’ in his The Stage Life of Props Tiffany Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text’, Shakespeare Survey, 66 W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance chapter 1 (1997)
Week 5: Literary Criticism and Poetics: Ideas in Context (Michael Hetherington)
This class will assume some familiarity with the most famous text of Elizabethan literary theory, Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1580–82), but its main focus will be on a slightly later moment in the history of critical discourse, at the very turn of the seventeenth century. For a number of reasons, the years 1598–1601 constituted a remarkably intense and unusually well-documented period of literary critical activity: these were the years of the late-Elizabethan satire-boom (followed by an episcopal satire ban); of a rapid-fire contest among a number of playwrights, including Marston, Dekker, Jonson and, less centrally, Shakespeare (the so-called poetomachia or War of the Theatres); of the cultural and political excitement provoked by the Earl of Essex; of an especially self-conscious and lively literary culture in the Inns of Court. These years therefore allow us to watch early modern literary criticism and poetics in action, not as an amalgam of timeless theoretical abstractions but in specific times, places, and cultural dialogues and debates.
Primary Reading:
* Daniel, Samuel, Musophilus (1599), in Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), pp. 65–98 * Jonson, Ben, Poetaster (1601), ed. Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), II, pp. 1–181; OR ed. Tom Cain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) * Scott, William, The Model of Poesy (1599), ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Other relevant works from the period, for those who wish to explore further, include: Davies, John, Nosce Teipsum (1599), in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1–67 Hall, Joseph, Virgidemiae (1597), in The Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1969), esp. pp. 11-20 (i.e. Book One) Hoskyns, John, Directions for Speech and Style (1599), in The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566-1638, ed. Louise Browne Osborn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), pp. 103–66 Leishman, J.B. (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598-1601) (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949)
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Marston, John, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Reactio (1598), in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), pp. 47–61, 81– 86
Secondary Reading
Alexander, Gavin, ‘Sidney, Scott, and the Proportions of Poetics’, Sidney Journal, 33 (2015), 7–28 Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (eds), The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) Bednarz, James P., Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) Cain, Tom, ‘“Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time”: Poetaster and the Essex Rebellion’, in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 48–70 Finkelpearl, Philip J., John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) Hetherington, Michael, ‘“An Instrument of Reason”: William Scott’s Logical Poetics’, Review of English Studies, 67 (2016), 448–67 Kneidel, Gregory, ‘Samuel Daniel and Edification’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 44 (2004), 59–76 Manley, Lawrence, Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 15–25, 106–33, 137–58 McCabe, Richard A., ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 188–93 Meskill, Lynn S., Ben Jonson and Envy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 94–109 Turner, Henry S., The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–40, 114–52
Week 6: Early Modern Violence: a critical argument (Margaret Kean)
Read John Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes (1671), and his prose tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Laura Knoppers, ed., The 1671 Poems (2008), vol.2 of The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008-). You must use this volume for the introduction and notes – what does it tell you about current scholarly approaches to early modern studies in general, and Milton in particular? This will be a key section of our class discussion. [you might find it helpful to compare another earlier editorial approach, eg. John Carey Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (1968, 1997: Longman)].
N.H. Keeble & Nicholas McDowell, eds. Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings (2013), vol. 6 of The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008-). [You might wish to contrast this with the previous standard multivolume edition of Milton’s Prose Works from Yale.]
Sharon Achinstein ‘Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent’ MS 33 (1997). 133-58. Janel Mueller ‘The Figure and the Ground: Samson as Hero of London Nonconformity, 1662-1667’ in Grahan Parry and Joad Raymond, eds Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002) 137-62. Victoria Kahn Wayward Contracts: the crisis of political obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), chp 10 ‘Critique’, 252-78. Julia R. Lupton ‘Samson Dagonistes’ in Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology’ (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005), 181-204. John Carey ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism’ TLS, Sept 6 2002, 16-17 Alan Rudrum ‘Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes’ HLQ 65 3-4 (2002), 465-88. Feisal Mohamed ‘Confronting Religious Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes’ PMLA 120.2 (2005), 327-40
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Week 7: Literature of the Stuart Restoration (Paulina Kewes) NB this class will take place at Jesus College
Primary Charles II, The Declaration of Breda (1660). John Dryden, Astraea Redux (1660), in Dryden: Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (London, 2007). Abraham Cowley, Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration and Returne of His Sacred Majestie Charls the Second (1660). A chosen text from Gerald MacLean (ed.), The Return of the King: An Anthology of English Poems Commemorating the Restoration of Charles II (Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library). http://cowley.lib.virginia.edu/MacKing/MacKing.html
If you have the time and inclination, you might also glance at:
George Morley, Bishop of Worcester, A sermon preached at the magnificent coronation of the most high and mighty King Charles the IId King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c.: at the Collegiate Church of S. Peter Westminster the 23d of April, being S. George's Day, 1661(London, 1661).
John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II . . . (London, 1662). [see The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage Through the City of London to His Coronation, facsimile with Introd. by R. Knowles (Binghamton, N.Y: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987).]
Secondary
Paulina Kewes & Andrew McRae, Introduction to Literature of the Stuart Successions, ed. Kewes & McRae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): to be supplied in typescript. Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660-1714 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Oblivion, Acts of Remembrance: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650-1832, ed. Lorna Clymer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 103-31. Carolyn A. Edie, ‘Right Rejoicing: Sermons on the Occasion of the Stuart Restoration, 1660’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University of Manchester Library, 62 (1972), 61-86. N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). David R. Evans, ‘Charles II’s “Grand Tour”: Restoration Panegyric and the Rhetoric of Travel Literature, Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 53-71. Gerard Reedy S.J., ‘Mystical Politics: The Imagery of Charles II’s Coronation’, in Paul J. Korshin (ed.), Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History 1640-1800 (Menston: The Scholar Press, 1972), pp. 19-42. Jessica Munns, ‘Accounting for Providence: Contemporary Descriptions of the Restoration of Charles II’, in Dan Doll and Jessica Munns (eds), Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Journal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2006), pp. 102- 121. Tim Harris, ‘The Restoration in Britain and Ireland’, in Michael Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also the Stuart Successions database and bibliographies available at http://stuarts.exeter.ac.uk/.
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Week 8: Katherine Philips. Female Homosociality, Interregnum and Restoration (Lorna Hutson)
In this class, we’ll consider the poetry of Katherine Philips according to three interrelated frameworks. First, in relation to the question of ‘scribal publication’ as described by Harold Love (Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford University Press, 1993). Carol Barash (see reading list) discusses Philips’s manuscripts and enables us to compare the ordering of poems in different manuscripts with those in the printed editions of 1664 and 1667. Second, we will consider recent work in the history of sexuality, which identifies Philips’s poetry as lesbian poetry. Finally, we will look at the Ciceronian tradition of male political and ethical friendship – amicitia – and ask what Philips’s poetry does with that tradition.
Primary Reading: There is still no good edition of Philips’s poetry (we await Elizabeth Hageman’s edition.) Read what you can in The Collected Works of Katherine Phillips: the Matchless Orinda ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross Books, 1990) or read from Poems by the most deservedly Admired Katherine Philips: The matchless Orinda (London: 1667) which you can find on EEBO.
Secondary Reading:
Carol Barash, 'Women's Community and the Exiled King: Katherine Philips's Societyof Friendship', in English Women's Poetry 1649-1714 (Oxford University Press, 1996). Penelope Anderson, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), chapters 1, 2 and 4.
The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: a poetics of culture, politics, friendship eds. David L. Orvis and Ryan Singh Paul (Pittsburgh: Dusquene State Press, 2015).
Valerie Traub, ‘“Friendship so curst”: amor impossibilis, the homoerotic lament, and the nature of lesbian desire’, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002) 276-325. (reprinted in The Noble Flame).
Kate Lilley, ‘“Dear Object”: Katherine Philips’s Love Elegies and their Readers’, Women’s Writing 1550-1750 eds. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (Bundoora, 2001) 163-78.
James Loxley, ‘Unfettered Organs: the Polemical Voices of Katherine Philips’, ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, eds. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Macmillan, 2000) 230-49.
Lorna Hutson, ‘The Body of the Friend and the Woman Writer: Katherine Philips’s Absence from Alan Bray’s The Friend (2003)’, Women’s Writing, 14:2 (August, 2007) 196-214. (reprinted in The Noble Flame)
Catharine Gray, ‘Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie’, English Literary Renaissance (2002) 426-451 (reprinted in The Noble Flame)
John Kerrigan, ‘God in Wales: Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips’ in Archipelagic English: Literature, History, Politics 1603-1707 (Oxford: 2008) 195-219.
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B-Course: Material Texts – Michaelmas Term - 1550-1700 Professor Adam Smyth ([email protected])
The B-Course provides an introduction to bibliography, book history and textual scholarship for the study of literature. It includes both the study of books as singular physical objects and as texts that may exist in multiple physical states. Weekly readings (below) are offered as general or theoretical introductions and as jumping-off points for your own explorations: the list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive and will be supplemented by further reading lists provided each week. Readings marked with an asterisk are particularly recommended. Articles in periodicals are generally available online through SOLO, as are an increasing number of books.
As preparation for the course, please read at least one of the following:
Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander and Zachary Lesser (eds), The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2016) Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1983) – an abridged version of Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1979). Note that this founding narrative is generally now critiqued: see, for example, Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago University Press, 1998) Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006) D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Text (Cambridge University Press, 1999) D.F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002) John Barnard, D.F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1557-1695, (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Also: acquaint yourself with the standard process of printing a book in the hand-press era (acquiring manuscript copy; casting off; composing; printing; proofing and correcting; binding). For this you can look at Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford University Press, 1972), or R.B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford University Press, 1927; reprinted by St. Paul's Bibliographies and Oak Knoll Press, 1994). You might supplement this by looking at Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683–4), edited by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1962; reprinted Dover Publications, 1978.)
Throughout the course, keep in mind the following questions: 1 How do we read and describe materiality? What significances do we attach to particular material features? Are there material features we tend to overlook? What kinds of literacies are required to read material texts? 2 To what degree is the process of production legible in the material text – or is the labour of making concealed beneath the finished book? 3 What relationships might we propose between material and literary form? 4 What does it mean to study the history of the book in the digital age?
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1. What is the History of The Material Text? In addition to the set reading, please survey recent editions of The Library, or Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and identify three strands, or tendencies, of recent published research: what kinds of questions are scholars asking today? We’ll discuss this in class.
*D.F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form,’ in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9-30 * Paul Eggert, ‘Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature’, The Library, 13:1 (2012), 3-32 * Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?,’ in Daedalus, 111:3, (1982), 65-83 * Robert Darnton, ‘“What Is the History of Books” Revisited,’ in Modern Intellectual History 4.3 (2007), 495-508 Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander and Zachary Lesser (eds), The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2016) Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (eds), Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature (Manchester University Press, 2013), ‘Introduction’, on the relationships between material and literary form. David Pearson, Books as History (The British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 2008) Jessica Brantley, ‘The Prehistory of the Book,’ in PMLA 124:2 (2009), 632-39
2. The Material Text: format, paper, type * Joseph A. Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (University of Notre Dame, 2012), chapters 3 (ink, paper), 5 (page format), 6 (typography) * Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, (Oxford University Press 1972), pp. 9-39 (type), 57-77 (paper), 78-117 (format) * Thomas Tanselle, ‘The Concept of Format,’ in Studies in Bibliography, 53, (2000), 67-115 * D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: the Case of William Congreve,’ in Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 199-200 Pauline Kewes, ‘“Give me the sociable Pocket-books”: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,’ in Publishing History, 38, (1995), 5-21 Joseph A. Dane and Alexandra Gillespie, ‘The Myth of the Cheap Quarto,’ in Tudor Books and the Material Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 25-45 Stephen Galbraith, ‘English Literary Folios 1593-1623: Studying Shifts in Format,’ in Tudor Books and the Material Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 46-67 Mark Bland, ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,’ in TEXT, 11, (1998), 91-154 Zachary Lesser, ‘Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity and the Meanings of Black Letter,’ in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 99-126. Available at http://works.bepress.com/zacharylesser/4
3. Theories of Editing * W. W. Greg, ‘Rationale of Copy-Text,’ in Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-1), 19-36 * Randall McLeod, ‘Un-Editing Shakespeare’, in Sub-Stance 33/34 (1982): 26-55 * Colin Burrow, 'Conflationism', in London Review of Books, 29.12 (21 June 2007), pp. 16-18 – review and discussion on Arden 3 treatment of Hamlet. * Peter L. Shillingsburg, ‘Is There Anything to 'Get Straight'?’ and ‘Individual and Collective Voices: Agency in Texts,’ in his Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (1997), pp. 1-12, 151-64
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* A.E. Housman, ‘The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,’ in The Classical Papers of A.E. Housman, 3 vols, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge, 1972), 3: 1058-69, reprinted in his Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (1961), pp. 131-50, and Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (1988), pp. 325-39 * James McLaverty, ‘Issues of Identity and Utterance: An Intentionalist Response to “Textual Instability,”’ in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (1991), pp. 134-51 Michael Hunter, Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basingstoke, 2007) Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. ‘The Socialization of the Text,’ pp. 69-83 G.T. Tanselle, ‘Reflections on Scholarly Editing’, in Raritan 16.2 (Fall 1996): 52-64 Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia, 1989) Gerald M. McLean, ‘What is a Restoration Poem? Editing a Discourse, not an Author,’ in TEXT 3 (1987), 319-46
4. Ideas of the Author and the History of Copyright * Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), http://copy.law.cam.ac.uk/cam/index.php -- extremely useful selection of texts. Browse according to your interests. * Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, ‘What is a Book?,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2013), pp. 188-204 * Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141-60 * Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago University Press, 2002), chapter 1 (‘An Introduction to Bibliographical Politics’) and 8 (‘Authentic Reproductions’) John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell, 1994), pp. 10-36 (‘The Origins of Copyright, 1475-1640’), pp. 37-63 (‘From Custom to Statute, 1640-1710’), pp. 64-96 (‘Defining the Law 1710-1800’) Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (Yale University Press, 2007)
5. The History of Reading * Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching,’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (3rd edition, University of California Press, 2011), pp. 165-176 * Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory 1500-1700 (University of Chicago Library, 2005) * Roger Chartier, ‘Popular Appropriation: The Readers and their Books,’ in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 83-98 * William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance Books (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) J. Raven, H. Small, and N. Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 138–61 H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale University Press, 2001) Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700,’ in Journal of the History of Ideas 64, (2003), 11-28 Roger Chartier, ‘Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader,’ in Diacritics 22, (1992), 49– 61
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Margaret Ezell, ‘Mr. Spectator on Readers and the Conspicuous Consumption of Literature,’ in Literature Compass, 1, (2003), 1-7 James Raven, ‘New Reading Histories, Print Culture and the Identification of Change: the Case of Eighteenth-Century England,’ in Social History 23, (1998), 268-87 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,’ in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 42-79
6. Collecting, Preserving, and Transmitting the Text: Collections and Libraries * Roger Chartier and Lydia G Cochrane, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth centuries (Polity, 1994) * Thomas Tanselle, ‘Descriptive Bibliography and Library Cataloguing,’ in Studies in Bibliography 30, (1977), 1-56 * Will Noel, ‘The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums’, 2013 lecture on digital data, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPJ_kciC15I Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,’ in Representations 71, (2000), 24-47 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Building a Library,’ in The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 319-32 Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‘Consuming Readers: Ladies, Lapdogs, and Libraries,’ in Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 196-255 Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Joseph A. Dane, ‘Classification and Representation of Early Books,’ in Dane, The Myth of Print Culture, chapter 3 Gile Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (eds), Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections (London: The British Library, 2009) Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2008) Clare Sargent, ‘The Physical Setting: The Early Modern Library (to c. 1640),’ in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume 1 to 1640, eds Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 51-65 The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. II: 1640–1850, edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Keith Manley, (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
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Hilary Term B-Course: Early Modern Textual Cultures: Writing, Circulating, Reading Dr Ben Higgins ([email protected])
This course continues the work begun in your general bibliography course in Michaelmas Term by focussing on the specific circumstances of the production, use, and circulation of texts and books, in print and manuscript, in the early modern period, and the challenges these pose to the modern literary scholar, textual critic, and editor. Your B-Course will be assessed by a written piece of work, due in 10th week of Hilary Term, on a topic expressive of the thinking and research you have conducted on the B-Course. Although there is no necessity to submit your title until 6th week of Hilary Term, the earlier you clarify your ideas, the more time you will have to develop them, and it is worth thinking about this during Michaelmas Term. Your course tutors will help you develop your essay topic in the early weeks of Hilary Term. You will be expected to read about 150 pages of specified material for each class, which will form the basis of discussion in the first hour. Each student will be expected to deliver a short (7- minute) presentation, on the subject of their own B-course essay, during the course of the term; these presentations, and a Q&A session following them, will take up the second hour.
Items marked with an asterisk are particularly recommended. Week 1: Manuscript Culture
We will start by thinking about early modern manuscript culture: how were handwritten texts composed, copied, altered, circulated, read? How public were these texts? What kinds of communities and coteries consumed them? How much control did authors have over circulation? How did texts move between readers? How stable were manuscripts?
* Robert Darnton, ‘Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study Manuscripts,’ in Harvard Library Bulletin 4:4 (Winter 1993-94), 37-42 * Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1993), reprinted as The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Massachussets Press, 1998), esp. pp. 3-90 * Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1-21 * Victoria Burke, ‘Let’s Get Physical: Bibliography, Codicology, and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscripts,’ in Literature Compass 4.6 (2007), 1667-8 * Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. ‘Social Textuality in the Manuscript System,’ pp. 135-208 Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon, 1998) Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology: 1450 to 2000 (Oxford University Press, 2009) - useful and fascinating to browse S. P. Cerasano and Steven W. May (eds), In the Prayse of Writing: Early Modern Manuscript Studies (British Library, 2012) James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds), Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580-1730 (Palgrave, 2010)
Week 2: Textual Transmission: print, manuscript, orality How, and with what consequences, did texts move between different media? What relationship existed between these different forms of publication? How was the act of writing in manuscript changed by the culture of print? Is early modern literary scholarship built around print-centric assumptions? How do we respond – as readers, textual scholars, literary critics, editors – to the fact that many early modern texts exist in multiple, variant forms?
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* David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 1-21 * Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. chapter 9, ‘Print and the Lyric,’ pp. 209-90 * Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1993), reprinted as The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Massachussets Press, 1998), esp. chapter 7, ‘The ambiguous triumph of print,’ pp. 284- 312 Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Ohio State University Press, 2000) Alexandra Gillespie (ed.), ‘Manuscript, Print and Early Tudor Culture,’ in Huntington Library Quarterly Special Edition 67 (2004) Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982, new edition Routledge, 2002) Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Book Before Print,’ in The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010) Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 1994)
Week 3: Editing early modern texts
Building on our sense of the mobility of early modern texts, we’ll talk through a number of short examples of texts, both manuscript and print, that present particular challenges for editors. How might we respond to variants? To revisions (by author, or scribe, or reader)? To errors? To what degree should editors convey (and how?) the materiality of the text? What role do we assign to authorial intention? To reception? What potentials and problems does digital editing present? Is editing necessarily an interpretative intervention – and if so, is this a problem?
* W. W. Greg, ‘Rationale of Copy-Text,’ in Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-1), 19-36. See also Harold Love, Scribal Publication, pp. 313-56, for a critique based on manuscript editing * Goldberg, Jonathan. “‘What? in a names that which we call a Rose’: The Desired Texts of Romeo and Juliet,’ in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (AMS Press, 1988), pp. 173-202 * Random Cloud, ‘FIAT fLUX,’ in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (AMS, 1988), pp. 61-172 * Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (Routledge, 1996), esp. pp. 1-38 * Michael Hunter, ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice,’ in The Seventeenth Century, 10, 277-310 Michael Ruddick (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh: A Historical Edition (Renaissance English Text Society 1998) – an intriguing response to the textual chaos of Raleigh’s manuscripts verse. Read the introduction, in particular. Random Cloud, ‘“The Very Names of the Persons”: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character,’ in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (Routledge, 1991), pp. 88-96 G. Thomas Tanselle, Introduction to Scholarly Editing (Book Arts Press, 2002), Part 1, pp. 12-22 Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (University of Virginia Press, 1983) Erick Keleman, Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (Norton, 2009), esp. pp. 73-120 Paul Werstine, ‘Editing Shakespeare and Editing Without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing,’ in TEXT 13 (2000), 27-53 Margaret J.M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
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G. Thomas Tanselle Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-2000 (Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2005): six lucid chapters on the major shifts in textual scholarship since Greg. These chapters originally appeared in Studies in Bibliography (respectively, 1975 (28: 167- 229); 1981 (34:23-65), 1986 (39: 1-46), 1991 (44: 83-143), 1996 (49:1-60), and 2001 (54: 1-80)): you can read them via JSTOR or on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb)
Week 4: Agents of book-making: authors, stationers, publishers, printers, sellers How clearly can we define the roles of author, stationer, publisher, printer, bookseller? What range of activities did they perform? How much did they overlap? How did these categories shift over time? How useful is biography as a variable for thinking about print culture? Is the history of print becoming the history of individual agents? Or is there an emerging emphasis on the always-collaborative nature of textual production?
* Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1-52 * Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 1-40 * Dip into Henry R. Plomer et al., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, either 1557-1640 (Bibliographical Society, 1910), or 1641 to 1667 (Bibliographical Society, 1907) – and think about (i) networks of printers and sellers (how do individuals connect to other individuals, and with what consequences?); (ii) the degree to which biography is a helpful variable for thinking about book production. Helen Smith, ‘The Publishing Trade in Shakespeare’s Time,’ in Andrew R. Murphy (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Wiley, 2007), pp. 17-34 Marta Straznicky, Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Read esp. the introduction, and sample other chapters. Marcy L. North, ‘Ignoto and the Book Industry,’ in The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 56-88. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Peter Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul's Cross Churchyard (London, 1990).
Week 5: Censorship and licensing
We’ll think about the mechanics of licensing and censorship, across different genres of writing, focusing in particular on the Stationers’ Company, the Church and the Licensers. What happened to books that transgressed these codes? What were the mechanics of censorship, and how effective were such acts?
* Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks,’ in A New History of Early English Drama, eds John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 389-415 * Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 26-51, ‘Speculation in the book trade’ * Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘The Stationers’ Company of London,’ in The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700, eds James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 170 (Gale Research, 1996), pp. 275-291 * Richard McCabe, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,’ in Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981), 188-93 Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 AD, 4 vols (privately printed, 1875-94; rpt. Peter Smith, 1950) – useful if you could spend some time wandering around this text. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
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Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 87-134, ‘“A free Stationers wife of this companye”: Women and the Stationers’ Joseph Lowenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 1-88 John Feather, ‘The Origins of Copyright, 1475-1640,’ and ‘From Custom to Statute, 1640-1710’ in Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell, 1994), 10-36, 37-63
Week 6: Readers and reading practices
How we might attempt to recover the reading practices of early modern readers. What is the archive for recovering this apparently silent, private act? We’ll think in particular about annotations and commonplace books. The history of reading is still a relatively new field: what methodological problems / blind-spots / opportunities can we detect?
* Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,’ Past and Present, 129, (1990), 30–78. A paradigmatic article. Is it time to shift paradigms? * William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. pp 3-52 * Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,’ in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42-79 * Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,’ in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (RETS, 1993), pp. 131-47 * Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, ‘Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare, 1590-1619,’ in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Wiley, 2007), pp. 35-56 Adam Smyth, ‘“Shreds of holinesse”: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England,’ in English Literary Renaissance 42.3 (Autumn 2012), 452–481 Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink (eds), The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England [Special Issue], in Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010), 345-552: several compelling articles giving a good sense on the variety of approaches to the subject. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2000).
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M.St. in English Literature, 1700-1830
Convenors: Professor David Womersley ([email protected]) Professor Fiona Stafford ([email protected]) A-Course – 1700-1830 - Michaelmas Term Structure: canonical core text or texts each week, with suggestions for tangential and less canonical explorations radiating from it. Read as many of the core texts as possible before the beginning of term. The tangential routes leading off from the core will be available in 0th Week. Paperback editions (Oxford World’s Classics or equivalent) are sufficient for vacation reading. You will be expected to consult the standard scholarly editions when you arrive. Everybody reads the core text or texts, and then also explores 1 or 2 of the less canonical off- shoots. Each week 2 students are designated to lead. 2-hour classes, with a 10-minute break in the middle.
Essential Preparatory Reading:
Andrew Sanders, Short Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford, 1996), pp. 276-404. This will give you an aerial image of the literature of the period, as well as some generalisations to argue with or about.
Course Schedule:
1. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704) 2. Pope, The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743) 3. Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard (1751), Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768) 4. Johnson, Lives of the Poets (1779), esp. ‘Life of Richard Savage’ (first published, 1744) and ‘Life of Gray’ 5. Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), and Tam O’Shanter (1791) 6. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800) 7. Austen, Persuasion (1817) 8. Byron, Don Juan (1819, 1821, 1823, 1824)
General reading and useful reference works:
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (1991) Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000) Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (1946) Marshall Brown (ed.), Romanticism, vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (2000) [available online through SOLO] James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2009) [available online through SOLO] Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2001) David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2003)
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David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2nd edn, 2003) Michael Ferber (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (2006) Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (2006) [available online through SOLO] Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (1989) Iain McCalman (gen. ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776– 1832 (1999) [available online through SOLO] Charles Mahoney (ed.), A Companion to Romantic Poetry (2011) [available online through SOLO] H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (1997) [available online through SOLO] Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008) Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition (2000) John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–1780 (2005) [available online through SOLO] Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005) James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (1993) W. A. Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics and Culture, 1680–1820 (1998) Jane Stabler, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790–1830 (2002) Fiona Stafford, Reading Romantic Poetry (2012) David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Blackwell, 2000) [available online through SOLO] Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (1999) [available online through SOLO] Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology (3rd edn, 2006; or 4th edn, 2012).
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B-Course Material Texts - 1700-1830 - Michaelmas Term Dr Carly Watson ([email protected])
The B Course is compulsory for all M.St. students. It provides an introduction to bibliography, book history, and textual scholarship as they apply to the study of literature.
This course is designed to enable students to: 1. Use and appraise a range of approaches to studying the material form of books; 2. Understand the process of making books in the hand-press era (1500–1800); 3. Precisely describe the physical features of printed books; 4. Analyse how the meaning of a text is shaped by its medium (print or manuscript); 5. Understand the roles of authors and publishers in the production and distribution of books; 6. Apply and evaluate textual critical approaches to dealing with the problems of material texts; 7. Apply and critique approaches to recovering the habits and experiences of readers of the past.
Throughout the course, keep in mind the following questions: 1. How do we read and describe materiality? What significances do we attach to particular material features? Are there material features we tend to overlook? What kinds of literacies are required to read material texts? 2. To what degree is the process of production legible in the material text—or is the labour of making concealed beneath the finished book? 3. What relationships might we propose between material and literary form? 4. What does it mean to study the history of the book in the digital age?
Course Outline
Week 1 Bibliography, book history, and literary study Week 2 The printed book: technologies and materials Week 3 Manuscript, print, and meaning Week 4 Authors, publishers, and copyright Week 5 Textual criticism and theories of editing Week 6 Books and readers
Required Reading
In preparation for the first seminar, please read the following pieces, all of which are available online: Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111 (1982), 65– 83 [available via OxLIP and JSTOR] Robert Darnton, ‘“What is the History of Books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 495–508 [available via OxLIP] Paul Eggert, ‘Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature’, The Library, 13 (2012), 3–32 [available via OxLIP] D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form’, in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–30 [available via SOLO]
In addition, familiarise yourself with the process of making books in the hand-press era. The standard account is Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Clarendon Press, 1972; repr. Oak Knoll Press, 1995), pp. 5–170. An earlier, but still useful, account is Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Clarendon Press, 1927), Part I; the 1928 reprint of McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography is available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005754570;view =1up;seq=7. We will discuss the materials and technologies of book production in Week 2.
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Selected Reading
This list offers a selection of introductory surveys and landmark works in the fields of bibliography, book history, and textual scholarship. You are strongly encouraged to explore and get to know some of these works in preparation for the course. Topic-specific reading lists for seminars in Week 2 and beyond will be provided in advance. Craig S. Abbott and William Proctor Williams, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (Modern Language Association, 1985; 4th edn, 2009) Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Polity, 1994) Joseph A. Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds, The Book History Reader (Routledge, 2002) D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1994) [available online via SOLO] Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006) Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago University Press, 1998) Erick Kelemen, Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (Norton, 2009) Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Broadview, 2017) D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999) [available online via SOLO] D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002) Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and Michael L. Turner, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) [available online via SOLO] G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
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B-Course - Textual Cultures 1700-1830 - Hilary Term Dr Carly Watson ([email protected])
This course builds on the general introduction to bibliography and book history in Michaelmas Term by focusing on aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of texts in print and manuscript in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The B Course is assessed by an extended essay (6,000–7,000 words), due in Week 10 of Hilary Term, on a topic of your choice, showcasing evidence and analytical methods drawn from bibliography, book history, and/or textual scholarship. You will not need to finalise your essay title until Week 6, but the earlier you clarify your ideas, the more time you will have for research. Your tutor will help you develop your topic in the early weeks of Hilary Term. You will be expected to give a short presentation on your topic in one of the weekly seminars; this will be an opportunity to refine your thinking and gain feedback from your tutor and peers.
Course Outline Week 1 The book trade and publishing trends Week 2 Cheap print and popular culture Week 3 Ornament and illustration Week 4 Authorship and print culture Week 5 Periodicals and the circulation of texts Week 6 Letters in manuscript and print
Selected Reading
This list offers a selection of major works relevant to the topics covered by the course. You are encouraged to refer to it throughout the course and use it as a starting-point for your own explorations. Reading lists for each seminar will be provided in advance. Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680– 1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty, eds, Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. by James McLaverty (Clarendon Press, 1991) Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Clarendon Press, 1997) [available online via SOLO] Christina Ionescu, ed., Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text (Cambridge Scholars, 2011) [available online via SOLO] Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters & Samuel Johnson (Princeton University Press, 1987) James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (Yale University Press, 2007) Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester University Press, 1982) Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (Continuum, 2001) [available online via SOLO] William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Kim Wheatley, ed., Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (Frank Cass, 2003) Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford University Press, 2009) [available online via SOLO]
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M.St. in English Literature, 1830-1914
Convenors: Dr Stefano Evangelista ([email protected]) Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr ([email protected]) Dr David Russell ([email protected])
A - Course – Michaelmas Term
The aim of the A course is to introduce students to important critical debates within Victorian studies. Classes will draw on both primary and critical texts. Each class will open with one or two presentations by students, who are asked to engage critically with the material, not just to summarize it. Access to the materials for the classes is provided via two routes: either via the urls below; or as scanned documents via web learn https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/humdiv/engfac/grad
Please follow the links from: - Information for Students - MSt. and M.Phil. Resources (including reading lists), - MSt. 1830-1914. The journal articles are all available via SOLO if you prefer to access them that way.
1. Boundaries. (SE, KSB)
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) [Available as ebook via SOLO]: Arnold, Matthew, ed. Culture and Anarchy [Electronic Resource]. Ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: OUP, 2006. OR http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4212 T.H. Huxley, “Literature and Science” Raymond Williams, from Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Columbia UP 1958): “Introduction”, Chs. 3, “Mill on Bentham and Coleridge” and 6, JH Newman and Matthew Arnold” [print] and from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (OUP, 1976), “Criticism” and “Culture” [print] Rita Felski, “’Context Stinks!’”, New Literary History 42 (Autumn 2011), 4: 573-91. Introduction, Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus, Michele Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (OUP, 2016); available as e-book via SOLO
2. Science and Interdisciplinarity. (KSB leading)
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), extracts to be provided John Tyndall, ‘Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, with Additions, 1874’. http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html Gillian Beer, Open Fields, chapter on ‘The Death of the Sun’ Charlotte Sleigh, introduction to Literature and Science
3. National, transnational and global literatures. (SE leading)
Johann Goethe, definitions of ‘world literature’ (extracts provided) Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000) https://newleftreview.org/II/1/franco- moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature Caroline Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies 55:4 (2013)
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Planetarity’, from Death of a Discipline (2003) [Available as ebook via SOLO] This chapter contains a critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). It would be good if you could familiarise yourselves with that work too, ahead of the class. Boehmer, Elleke, Introduction, in Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2016) – available via SOLO 4. Nature and the Environment. (KSB leading)
Christina Rossetti, ‘Hurt no living thing,’ ‘Hopping Frog, hop here and be seen,’ ‘Hear what the mournful linnets say’, available online (try The Poetry Foundation web site) or in In Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing and Illustration, 1780-1930, ed. Barbara T. Gates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford Classics edition), chapter 1 Richard Kerridge, ‘Ecological Hardy,’ in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Karla Ambruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2001), 126-42. If you are interested in further sources of and on Victorian eco-crit: http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/science/environment/index.html
5. Gender and Sexualities. (SE leading)
George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ Westminster Review, (Oct 1856): 442-461. [print] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol 1: Introduction (1976) [print] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)– Introduction and Chapter 4: ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic’ [print]
6. Performance. (KSB leading)
Elizabeth Robins, Alan’s Wife (1893) Emile Zola, ‘Le Naturalisme au theatre’ (1878) Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, introduction Sos Eltis and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, ‘What Was the New Drama?’ in Late Victorian into Modern Readings from Schumacher book on naturalism and symbolism—e.g., Strindberg’s preface to Miss Julie, Maeterlinck on the impact of Ibsen in ‘The Treasure of the Humble’ (to be provided) Sheila Stowell, ‘Rehabilitating Realism’
7. Art and Material Culture (SE leading)
Walter Pater, ‘Preface’, ‘Sandro Botticelli’, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, and ‘Conclusion’ in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) [print] John Ruskin, ‘The Work of Iron’ from The Two Paths (1859) http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7291/pg7291-images.html Oscar Wilde, Salome (1894 edition, with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley) Special issues (19 and 23) of nineteen, respectively on The Victorian Tactile Imagination and The Arts and Feeling - read the introductions to both issues and a couple of essays from each issue: they will suggest useful ways to approach the primary readings for this week. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/87/volume/0/issue/19/ http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/91/volume/2016/issue/23/
8. Emergent Genres and Issues in Victorian studies. (SE, KSB)
For our last class, we shall look at a range of recent issues of the major Victorian journals and discussing which kinds of work are currently dominant (e.g. thing theory, finance and economics- related criticism, gender studies), what their distinctive attributes are, and what might be their predictable strengths and weaknesses. We’ll also be discussing where the major fault-lines lie
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(formalism v. cultural materialism, different kinds of history, Englishness v. cosmopolitanism and/or trans-Atlantic studies). Students will be asked to do some preparatory scoping of the most influential journals, including Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, and to undertake some initial taxonomic work.
B Course: Material Texts, 1830–1914 - Michaelmas Term Dr Carly Watson ([email protected])
The B Course is compulsory for all M.St. students. It provides an introduction to bibliography, book history, and textual scholarship as they apply to the study of literature.
This course is designed to enable students to 1. Use and appraise a range of approaches to studying the material form of books; 2. Understand the process of making books in the machine-press era (1800–1950); 3. Precisely describe the physical features of printed books; 4. Analyse how the meaning of a text is shaped by its medium (print or manuscript); 5. Understand the roles of authors and publishers in the production and distribution of books; 6. Apply and evaluate textual critical approaches to dealing with the problems of material texts; 7. Apply and critique approaches to recovering the habits and experiences of readers of the past.
Throughout the course, keep in mind the following questions: 1. How do we read and describe materiality? What significances do we attach to particular material features? Are there material features we tend to overlook? What kinds of literacies are required to read material texts? 2. To what degree is the process of production legible in the material text—or is the labour of making concealed beneath the finished book? 3. What relationships might we propose between material and literary form? 4. What does it mean to study the history of the book in the digital age?
Course Outline Week 1 Bibliography, book history, and literary study Week 2 The printed book: technologies and materials Week 3 Manuscript, print, and meaning Week 4 Authors, publishers, and copyright Week 5 Textual criticism and theories of editing Week 6 Books and readers
Required Reading In preparation for the first seminar, please read the following pieces, all of which are available online: Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111 (1982), 65– 83 [available via OxLIP and JSTOR] Robert Darnton, ‘“What is the History of Books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 495–508 [available via OxLIP] Paul Eggert, ‘Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature’, The Library, 13 (2012), 3–32 [available via OxLIP] D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form’, in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–30 [available via SOLO] In addition, familiarise yourself with the process of making books in the machine-press era (1800–1950). The standard account is Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Clarendon Press, 1972; repr. Oak Knoll Press, 1995), pp. 189–296. We will discuss the materials and technologies of book production in Week 2.
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Selected Reading This list offers a selection of introductory surveys and landmark works in the fields of bibliography, book history, and textual scholarship. You are strongly encouraged to explore and get to know some of these works in preparation for the course. Topic-specific reading lists for seminars in Week 2 and beyond will be provided in advance. Craig S. Abbott and William Proctor Williams, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (Modern Language Association, 1985; 4th edn, 2009) David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds, The Book History Reader (Routledge, 2002) D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1992) [available online via SOLO] Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006) Erick Kelemen, Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (Norton, 2009) Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Broadview, 2017) D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999) [available online via SOLO] David McKitterick, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 6: 1830–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) [available online via SOLO] Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012) [available online via SOLO] Frances Robertson, Print Culture: From Steam Press to Ebook (Routledge, 2013) James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
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B Course: Bibliography, Theories of Text, History of the Book, Manuscript Studies 1830–1914 – Hilary Term Course convenors: Dr Oliver Clarkson ([email protected]) Dr Will Bowers ([email protected])
The strand-specific portion of the B-course will pick up where the methodological introduction left off. It will focus on aspects of book history, manuscript studies and editing, pertinent to the period, such as the prominence of serial and periodical publication, expanding reading and literacy, and the challenges faced by writers and publishers in the production and circulation of literary texts, as well as the difficulties and opportunities these issues present to the literary scholar and the textual critic.
The course will include an introduction to working with manuscript sources and archival resources in Oxford and beyond. In Hilary term you will write an essay investigating any one of the topics covered across the course. This is likely to involve either the preparation of an edition or a consideration of a topic relating to book history or manuscript studies, usually based on empirical or archival research. The course convenors will assist you in developing your topic.
We will meet three times in Michaelmas term (in Week 7 and 8) and continue in Weeks 1-5 in Hilary Term. There will be six classes, led by different specialist tutors, with the final two meetings reserved for student presentations on work in progress (of about ten minutes’ duration).
1. Nineteenth-Century Books, Manuscripts, and Editing. Will Bowers & Oliver Clarkson. 2. Illustrations. Ushashi Dasgupta. 3. From Manuscript to Print Culture: Revision in Victorian Verse. Michael Sullivan. 4. Victorian Periodicals. Sally Shuttleworth. 5. Dickens and Serialisation. Clive Hurst. 6. ‘B list to C list’: Byron, Conrad and the Manuscripts of Celebrity. Chris Fletcher. 7 & 8. Student Presentations.
Further reading
Books and book history Brake, Laurel and Codell, Julie, Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (2005) Brake, Laurel, Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History (2001) Brake, Laurel, and Demoor, Marysa (eds.), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (2009) McKitterick, David, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 6: 1830-1914 (2014) Price, Leah, How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (2012) Price, Leah, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (2002)
Victorian publishing: publishers, periodicals and serials Cantor, G. N and Shuttleworth, Sally, Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (2004) Dooley, Allan C., Author and Printer in Victorian England (1992) Finkelstein, David, The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) Finkelstein, David, Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930 (2006) Hughes, Linda K. and Lund, Michael, The Victorian Serial (1991) Hughes, Linda K. and Lund, Michael, Victorian Publishing and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Work (1999) Jordan, John and Patten, Robert, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (1995) King, Andrew, Easley, Alexis and Morton, John (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth- Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, 2 vols. (2016-17) Patten, Robert, Charles Dickens and his Publishers (1978)
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Salmon, Richard, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (2015) Shillingsburg, Peter, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray (1992) Sutherland, John, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976)
Readers and reading practices Buckland, Adelene and Palmer, Beth, A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900 (2011) Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (1993) Raven, James, Small, Helen and Tadmor, Naomi, The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (1996) Wicke, Jennifer, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (1988)
Manuscripts and revisions Bushell, Sally, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (2009) Fordham, Finn, I do I undo I redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves (2010) Horne, Philip, Henry James and Revision (1990) Kennedy, Judith (ed.), Victorian Authors and their Works: Revision, Motivations and Modes (1991) Ricks, Christopher, ‘Tennyson’s Methods of Composition’ (1966) Stillinger, Jack, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991) Sullivan, Hannah, The Work of Revision (2013)
You will also find it useful to refer to period- and author-specific articles in the key journals: The Library, Studies in Bibliography and TEXT (subsequently Textual Cultures; Word and Image).
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M.St. in English Literature, 1900-Present
Convenors: Dr Marina Mackay ([email protected]) Professor Laura Marcus ([email protected])
A-Course – Literature, Context and Approaches Thursday 10-12, Seminar Room A
This course will explore significant texts, themes, and critical approaches in our period, drawing on expertise from across the Faculty in modern literary studies. You should read as much in the bibliography over the summer as you can—certainly the primary literary texts listed in the seminar reading for each week. Each week two or more members of the group will present papers based on the material. The allocation of presenters will be made at an introductory meeting in week 0.
Week 1: Models of Modernity (Laura Marcus and Marina MacKay) How can we tell the story of literature from 1900 to the present? The nature of the overview will vary according to which authors, which literatures, and which modes of writing. This seminar, without pretending to offer a complete picture, will consider a range of influential and emergent accounts of the modern.
Seminar reading
Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism? New Left Review I/175 (May-June 1989): https://newleftreview.org/I/175/raymond-williams-when-was-modernism Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/ Modernism’, Modernism / Modernity, 8 (2001): 493-513. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, 3 (May 2008): 737-48. Michael H Whitworth, ‘When Was Modernism’, in Laura Marcus et al. Late Victorian into Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 119-32. Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, American Literary History 20, 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 410-19.
Week 2: Colonial Contact Zones (Graham Riach) This seminar will consider some of the ways what we now call modernist writing registered the impact of empire. Was modernism a response to a far more intensive and disruptive contact with other cultures than Europe had registered previously? In what ways were both the expansion of empire and modernist writing catalysed by a global process of modernization?
Seminar reading Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) Katherine Mansfield, Collected Short Stories, particularly: ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Garden Party’ (i.e. her longer short fiction) W.B. Yeats, Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (1912) T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
Further reading Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) (especially chapters 1-3) Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (eds.) Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005) Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, Norton Anthology 7th edn Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific
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Week 3: Modernist Narrative (Ms Jeri Johnson) Seminar reading James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Further reading
Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts’, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 53, no. 2 (Spring, 1945), pp. 221-240i Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953, esp. chapter on Woolf, ‘The Brown Stocking’). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K.McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Vol. 2 [chapter on the modernist time-novel, including Mrs Dalloway] J.Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) [Includes chapters on Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts] Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans Jane E Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Week 4: Periodization: Late Modernism/Midcentury/Post-Imperial/Postmodern (Dr Marina MacKay) Formerly overshadowed by the spectacular achievements of modernism and postmodernism, the once- neglected literature of the middle of the century has returned to view in a striking way in recent years. In this session, we’ll be considering the utility and implications of newly current terms such as ‘late modernism’ and ‘mid-century’ for thinking about how we periodise twentieth-century writing.
Seminar reading T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943) Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949) Jed Esty, ‘Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn’, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-22. Miller, Tyrus. ‘Introduction: The Problem of Late Modernism’, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3-25. Claire Seiler, ‘At Mid-Century: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’, Modernism/modernity 21. 1 (January 2014): 125-45.
Further reading Thomas Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). -----. ‘Late Modernism: British Literature at Mid-Century’, Literature Compass 9. 4 (April 2012): 326-37. Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-45 (London: Papermac, 1995). Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
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John Whittier-Ferguson, ‘Introduction: Virginia Woolf’s Late Style’, Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1-30.
Week 5: Keywords and Contested Signs (Michael Whitworth) How can we focus the cultural history of the period using the history of linguistic signs? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach? What methodological questions does it raise? In this session we will be studying entries from Raymond Williams’s classic study and from more recent projects in a similar vein, and reading criticisms of these works.
Seminar reading Cuddy-Keane, Melba, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism: Keywords (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Leary, John Patrick. ‘Keywords for the Age of Austerity’ https://theageofausterity.wordpress.com/ Williams, Raymond. Keywords (1976, or, ideally, the expanded 1983 edition).
Further reading If you can obtain the following easily, then read them; copies will be provided in term time: Empson, William. ‘Compacted Doctrines’ (1977). Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 185–6. A review of Williams, first published in the New York Review of Books. Skinner, Quentin. ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon.’ Essays in Criticism 29 no.3 (July 1979), pp.205-24.
Week 6: Theatre and Revolution (Sos Eltis) This session explores what constitutes a theatrical revolution. We will consider the impact of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s as important forerunners to theatrical innovations in the twentieth century, asking how these were revolutionary then and and how they are critically understood now. We will take three plays as case studies and look at how the initial responses to them compare with later critical assessments and analyses, for instance in the different perspectives on ‘1956 and all that’. We will also think about methodological challenges inherent in studying theatrical revolution, such the approach of reconstructing past performances and the need to take full account of the dual nature of theatre as both text and performance.
Seminar reading Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1955) and Not I (1973) Sarah Kane, Blasted (1995) John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1956) You will also be given copies of some of the initial reviews of the three plays.
Further reading John Russell Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (London: Methuen1962), introduction, chapters 1-2 Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 98-112 Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 1-70 Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 1-36, and the rest of book if you have time. For further theatrical context see Michael Billington, State of the Nation (London: Faber, 2007)
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Week 7: Literature and Visual Culture (Professor Laura Marcus) Is modern culture a visual culture? If so, whose gaze does it privilege? In this seminar we’ll discuss some of the classic theoretical texts in visual culture studies in order to interrogate the association of modernity with the visual, the gendering of the gaze, and the impact of technological change. In a case study of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we’ll think about how literary texts are embedded in visual cultures and how they can depict and critique those cultures. We will also look at a recent novel, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), in order to assess the new and different ways in which contemporary fiction is engaging with and incorporating visual media.
Seminar reading Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927); ‘The Cinema’ (1926) Don DeLillo, Point Omega (2010). [Douglas Gordon’s video installation Psycho 24, a remaking of Hitchcock’s Psycho in slow time, is central to the novel – clips of Gordon’s installation should be available on YouTube.] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol 2, 1927-1934 (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 101-133. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1.2 (2002), 165-81 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6-18
Further reading John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994) Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Harvard University Press, 1999) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994) Hal Foster ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle, WA: Bay View Press/ Dia Art Foundation, 1988) Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, in Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 146-65 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993) Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002) Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford University Press, 2007) [Chapter 2 is on Virginia Woolf and cinema] W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986) Trotter, David, Cinema and Modernism (Blackwell: 2007); Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2013) ‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’, October, 77 (1996), 25-70
Week 8: Late Styles (Dr David Dwan) This seminar aims to explore different and sometimes rival conceptions of ‘lateness’ in contemporary poetry – the poet’s reflections on his/her own aging; the maturity of his/her own voice or style; the lateness of a cultural movement or what we might call mannerism; the cultural practices of an epoch defined by a sense of its own lateness - or what we used to call postmodernism. How do these issues bear upon poetic form and our broader understanding of the function of poetry?
Seminar reading Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006) Paul Muldoon, Songs and Sonnets (London: Enitharmon, 2012)
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Further reading Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, Essays on Music, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) Edward Said, from On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006)
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B Course: 1900-present - Michaelmas Term WEEK 1-6: Material Texts 1900-present See course details under Material Texts 1900-present (p. 63)
Hilary Term B-Course
Michaelmas Week 7. The Institution of Literature (1). Peter McDonald. Week 8. Reading Paratexts. Michael Whitworth
Hilary Week 1. Using Publishers’ Archives. Michael Whitworth. Week 2. Periodicals as Research Materials. Michael Whitworth Week 3. Ulysses and the Problem of the Text. Jeri Johnson Week 4. The Institution of Literature (2). Peter McDonald. Week 5. Student presentations: Michael Whitworth [*probably two sessions of two hours in week 5.]
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M.St. in English and American Studies
Convenors: Professor Lloyd Pratt ([email protected]) Dr Rachel Malkin ([email protected]
Michaelmas Term - A - Course Stories of American Literature This course offers an overview of several dominant, residual, oppositional, and emergent accounts of American literature. It does not propose a comprehensive history of American literature or American literary studies. It instead reads some key primary texts in light of several influential twentieth- and twenty-first-century frameworks for studying American writing. The central assumption is this: In order to understand American writing one must also understand the ways others understand it. The goal is not to overcome these other understandings. It is to begin constructing a sketch of the field of American literary studies, as well as its (sometimes oblique) relations to American studies, cultural studies, and the broader discipline of literary studies, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each week I will expect you to have read the full primary text and the selections from the secondary texts as listed below the bibliographic entry. You will receive an email from me in mid-September explaining how to access the secondary readings online. If you do not have access to a library with the secondary materials before your arrival in Oxford, you should concentrate on reading (or re-reading) the primary texts, all of which should be readily available. If you do have access to the secondary materials, I would recommend you start your reading of the secondary materials as soon as possible.
In advance of Week 1 I will distribute a list of four questions we’ll use to guide our discussion in Week 1. I will provide a brief introduction to the week’s readings at the open of each meeting. In Week 2 I will meet individually with each of you; we will not meet for seminar in Week 2. In Weeks 3-6 two (or three) students will work together to produce and distribute four discussion questions in advance. They will also lead the discussion after my brief introduction.
In the final two weeks of the course each of you will present a report on a recent primary text and a recent scholarly text. The list of texts you may choose from and the format of the reports are found at the end of this reading schedule. In addition to your A, B, and C Courses and Dissertation, you are expected to attend the American Literature Research Seminar at 5 pm on Thursdays of Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7 during term. Any conflicts with attending the ALRS should be cleared in advance with me.
Week 1 American Exceptionalism Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1988. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Preface Ch. 1: Puritanism and the American Self Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Introduction Ch. 1: The Broken Circuit Lawrence, DH. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Penguin, 1990.
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Ch. 1: The Spirit of Place Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman: New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Book 3: Melville Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Ch. 1: Errand into the Wilderness Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 1950. New York: NYRB Classics, 2008. The Sense of the Past
Week 2 Individual Meetings
Week 3 Making and Unmaking the American Self I Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Nature’ (1836) in Collected Works of Emerson. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Arsić, Branka. Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Introduction: On Affirmative Reading, or The Lesson of the Chickadees. Part I: Dyonisia, 467 BC: The Mythology of Mourning Cameron, Sharon. Impersonality: Seven Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Ch. 3: Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’ Ch. 4: ‘The Way of Life by Abandonment’: Emerson’s Impersonal Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Ch. 1: Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche
Week 4 Making and Unmaking the American Self II Whitman, Walt, Song of Myself. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. 1855. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 26-78.
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Ch. 2: The Argument of Form Ch. 3: Description Ch. 6: The Whitman Phrase Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Introduction: Whitman and the Politics of Embodiment
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Ch. 1: Rendering the Text and the Body Fluid
Week 5 The Cold War and the New Americanists Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 1968. New York: FSG Classics, 2008. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Vintage Classics, 1996. McGurl, Mark. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Introduction: Halls of Mirror Part One: ‘Write What You Know’ / ‘Show Don’t Tell’ (1890-1960) Pease, Donald E., ed. Revisionist Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon
Week 6 The Black Atlantic, the Diaspora, and the (Neo-) Slave Narrative Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Edwards, Brent. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Prologue Ch. 1: Variations on a Preface Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Preface Ch. 1: The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford, 1997. Introduction Part I: Formations of Terror and Enjoyment
Week 7 Reports on Secondary Texts
Week 8 Reports on Primary Texts
FORMAT OF THE REPORTS Select three primary and three secondary texts from the following list. You will be asked to submit your selections in rank order at the induction in Week 0. I will assign you one primary and one secondary text from your list of preferences. Please choose materials that you will not be working with in other courses. In Week 7 you will present a ten-minute summary and critique of the secondary
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text. In Week 8 you will present a ten-minute account of why, how, and in what context you would teach the primary text.
Secondary Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism (2011) Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) Buell, Lawrence. The Dream of the Great American Novel (2014) Coronado, Raúl. A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (2013) Dayan, Colin. The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011) Fraser, Nancy. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (2009) Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (2010) Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010) Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading (2013) Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought (2010) Warren, Kenneth W. What Was African American Literature? (2011)
Primary Díaz, Juno. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) Jefferson, Margo. Negroland (2015) Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland (2013) Marcus, Ben, ed. New American Stories (2015) Morrison, Toni. A Mercy (2008) Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda. Americanah (2013) Robinson, Marilynne. Home (2008) Roth, Philip. Nemesis (2010) Saunders, George. Tenth of December (2013)
Michaelmas Term B Course WEEK 1-6: Material Texts 1900-present See course details under Material Texts 1900-present (p. 63)
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B – Course - Hilary Term Professor Lloyd Pratt ([email protected])
In Weeks 1-3, each of you will do a twenty-minute presentation on a recent study that makes good use of methods in book history, print culture studies, and/or media history. As with your presentations last term, you should offer about fifteen minutes of careful, concise summary of the book’s argument, including, if possible, individual chapter summaries. The final five minutes of your presentation should focus on what you see as the book’s greatest strengths and any troublesome weaknesses. You should also try to offer a diagnostic account of the sources of those strengths and weaknesses: What has the study’s author done that produces the stronger aspects of the text? What has the author done that led to the weaknesses? At the end of the three presentations, we will use the remaining time to discuss the books as a group. Although the presenters will have read the entire book on which they are presenting, the rest of you will have read the individual chapters indicated below after ‘Class reading’. (The class reading selections will be provided via a Dropbox account.) Because the presentations will be timed, you should make sure to practice in advance and time yourself to make certain that you’re able to finish within the time allotted. I have allotted extra time in Week 3 for a synoptic discussion of the readings for the first three weeks. In Weeks 4-6, you will each pre-circulate a five- to ten-page draft document that will anticipate your B Course paper. You may circulate an extended and detailed outline, a five- to ten-page selection of draft prose, or a combination of the two. As you are preparing your pre-circulated document, keep in mind that the point of this exercise is to elicit useful feedback from your peers. If it would be helpful for us to have a copy of (a) key item(s) that form part of your ‘database’ for the paper, you may include it/them with your draft document. (The supplementary material(s) will not count toward the five- to ten-page limit.) You should circulate your draft document and supplementary material(s) no later than 5 pm on Sunday the week of your presentation. On the day of your presentation, you will offer a five-minute opening statement on your work. We will then ‘workshop’ the draft document. During the first ten minutes of the workshop, you will simply listen to other members of the class discuss your submission while taking notes. At the end of the ten-minute discussion of your work. You will have five minute to respond to the discussion. I recommend spending half of your time clarifying your aims based on what you have heard and half of your time asking follow-up questions of your peers. I would also encourage you to continue these conversations, either as a full cohort, or in smaller groups or pairs.
Bibliography Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Glass, Loren. Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Hager, Christopher. Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Liu, Alan, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
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Week 1 Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Chapter two Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Chapters 1-2 Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Chapters 1-2
Week 2 Liu, Alan, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Part III Glass, Loren. Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Chapter 1 Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production Presenter: Class reading: ‘Overview’ and ‘Windows’
Week 3 Hager, Christopher. Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing Presenter: Class reading: Introduction and Chapters 1-2
Week 4 Presentations
Week 5 Presentations
Week 6 Presentations
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M.St. in World Literatures In English
Convenors: Dr Michelle Kelly [email protected] Dr Graham Riach [email protected]
A: Michaelmas Term 2017
The Colonial, the Postcolonial, the World: Literature, Contexts and Approaches (A/Core Course)
The A course comprises 8 1.5 hour seminars and is intended to provide a range of perspectives on some of the core debates, themes and issues shaping the study of world and postcolonial literatures in English. In each case the seminar will be led by a member of the Faculty of English with relevant expertise, in dialogue with one or more short presentations from students on aspects of the week’s topic. There is no assessed A course work, but students are asked to give at least one presentation on the course, and to attend all the seminars. You should read as much in the bibliography over the summer – certainly the primary literary texts listed in the seminar reading for each week. The allocation of presenters will be made at the meeting in week 0.
Seminars take place on Tuesdays from 11-1 in the History of the Book Room in the English Faculty, except the seminar in week 2, which is held at St Hugh’s College.
Week 1 Theories of World Literature I: What Is World Literature?...What Isn’t World Literature? (Graham Riach)
This seminar will consider what we mean when we say ‘world literature’, looking at models proposed by critics as Emily Apter, David Damrosch, the WReC collective, and others. The category of ‘world literature’ has been in constant evolution since Johan Wolfgang von Goethe popularised the term in the early 19th Century, and in this session we will explore some of the key debates in the field.
Primary David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (2003). ––– ‘What Isn’t World Literature’, lecture available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfOuOJ6b- qY WReC (Warwick Research Collective), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2015) Extracts from Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Franco Moretti, Pascale Cassanova, Emily Apter and others.
Secondary David Damrosch, ‘World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age’ in Haun Saussay ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), pp. 43-53. Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (2000) 54-68.
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Mariano Siskind, ‘The Globalization of the Novel and The Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature’, Comparative Literature 62 (2010) 4: 336-60
Week 2 English in the world/Language beyond relativity (Peter McDonald)
NOTE: Venue for week 2 is St Hugh’s College, Louey Seminar Room. Take the Canterbury Road entrance to St Hugh’s.
Primary The Oxford English Dictionary (especially 1989 print edition and online, 2000-).
You should also read Sarah Ogilvie, Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2012), Florian Coulmas, Guardians of the Language (2016), and Perry Link’s short essay ‘The Mind: Less Puzzling in Chinese? (New York Review of Books, 30 June 2016), which is available via: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/06/30/the-mind-less-puzzling-in- chinese/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Krugman%20on%20King%20Als%20on%2 0Martin%20Cole%20on%20police&utm_content=NYR%20Krugman%20on%20King%20Als%20on %20Martin%20Cole%20on%20police+CID_9def725d3263b14fe6dce4894ed64907&utm_source=Ne wsletter&utm_term=The%20Mind%20in%20Chinese
Secondary Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, 1998 (French edition, 1996) Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (2016)
Preparation A (2 students: position papers, maximum 1000 words, on ONE of the following. Please ensure both topics are covered. Also bring along a handout with your key quotations—copies for the entire group) 1. Explain the significance of the epigraphs from Glissant and Khatibi for Derrida’s argument and analysis in Monolingualism. 2. Explain Taylor’s distinction between ‘designative-instrumental’ and ‘expressive-constitutive’ theories of language. B (all remaining students: single-sided A4 handout—copies for the entire group) Browse the OED, especially using the online feature that allows you to group words by origin and/or region, and select ONE loanword from a non-European language. On one side of an A-4 sheet give an account of the word, explaining why you think it has particular significance in the long history of lexical borrowing that constitutes the English language and the shorter history of the linguistic relativity thesis.
Week 3 The (Un)translatability of World Literature (Adriana X. Jacobs)
This seminar will examine the role of translation in the development of the category of world literature with a particular focus on the term “translatability.” We will consider how translation into “global” English has shaped contemporary understandings of translatability and how to reconcile
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these with the more recent turn to “untranslatability” in literary scholarship. To what extent are the parameters of world literature contingent on a translation economy that privileges certain languages, authors and texts over authors? What room is there in current configurations of world literature for works that “do not measure up to certain metrics of translational circulation” (Zaritt)?
Primary Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013) “To Translate,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Barbara Cassin, ed., ed. and trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014): 1139- 1155. (read introduction online: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10097.html)
Secondary Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd edition (New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2012): 240-253. Johannes Göransson, “‘Transgressive Circulation’: Translation and the Threat of Foreign Influence,” Cordite Poetry Review (November 1, 2016): www.cordite.org.au/essays/transgressive-circulation. Ignacio Infante, “On The (Un)Translatability of Literary Form: Framing Contemporary Translational Literature,” Translation Review 95.1 (2016): 1-7. Lydia Liu, “The Problem of Language in Cross-Cultural Studies,” in Translingual Practice:Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995): 1-42. Ronit Ricci, “On the untranslatability of ‘translation’: Considerations from Java, Indonesia,” Translation Studies 3.3 (2010): 287-301. Saul Zaritt, “‘The World Awaits Your Yiddish Word’: Jacob Glatstein and the Problem of World Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 34.2 (2015): 175-203.
Week 4 Literature and Performance of the Black Americas (Annie Castro)
In this seminar, we will engage with a variety of writings by Black authors across the Americas that emphasize issues of race, nationality, cultural heritage, and performance. This course will serve as an introduction into critical debates regarding the complex interchange of Afro-diasporic persons, ideas, and discourse across the Western Hemisphere.
Please come prepared to share a short (approximately 200 words), informal written review of the assigned readings. This review, which is intended to aid group discussion, should place the assigned texts in conversation with one another, particularly in regards to their conceptualizations of race and culture in artistic expression.
Primary Erna Brodber, Louisiana (1997)
Secondary DeFrantz, Thomas and Anita Gonzalez, “Introduction.” In Black Performance Theory (2014) Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Prologue,” “Variations on a Preface.” In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) Harris, Wilson. “History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” (1970). In Caribbean Quarterly: The 60th Anniversary Edition (2008)
Week 5
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Theories of World Literature II: Is World Literature Beautiful? (Graham Riach)
Traditional definitions of world literature are heavily based on the idea of universal cultural value. This seminar will consider some of the main issues in universalist conceptions of world literary value, particularly in relation to aesthetics, and the role of interpretive communities in dealing with distances in time, culture and language.
Primary Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2014) Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)
Secondary Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) Bill Ashcroft, ‘Towards a Postcolonial Aesthetics’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51, 4 (2015), pp. 410-421 Elleke Boehmer, ‘A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating Upon the Present’, in Janet Cristina Şandru Wilson and Sarah Lawson Welsh eds., Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (2010), pp. 170-181 Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) Simon Gikandi, ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 40,2 (2001), pp.318–50. Peter J. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (Oxford: OUP, 2013) Catherine Noske, ‘A Postcolonial Aesthetic? An Interview with Robert Young’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50, 5, 609-621 (2014) Rethinking Beauty, special issue of diacritics (32.1, Spring 2002)
Week 6 Cultural Memory and Reconciliation (Catherine Gilbert)
In this seminar, we will explore representations of conflict and its enduring impact in narratives from South Africa and Rwanda. In particular, we will consider questions surrounding the relationship between testimony and literature, how writers work to convey the complex nuances of trauma and memory, and the role of literature in remembrance and reconciliation.
Primary Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (London: Atlantic Books, 2004 [2001]). Jean Hatzfeld (ed), Into the Quick of Life. The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008).
Please also listen to: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of the Single Story’ (TED talk, 2009): https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
Secondary Jean Hatzfeld (ed), Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Picador, 2005). Esp. the chapters ‘In the shade of an acacia’, ‘Remorse and regrets’, ‘Bargaining for forgiveness’, and ‘Pardons’.
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Madelaine Hron, ‘Gukora and Itsembatsemba: The "Ordinary Killers" in Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season’, Research in African Literatures, 42.2 (2011), pp. 125-146. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (London: Vintage, 1999 [1998]). Esp. Chapter 3, ‘Bereaved and Dumb, the High Southern Air Succumbs’, pp. 38-74. Achille Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture, 14.1 (2002), pp. 239-273. Ana Miller, ‘The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit’, Studies in the Novel, 40.1-2 (2008), pp. 146-160. Zoe Norridge, Perceiving Pain in African Literature (London: Palgrave, 2012). Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds), The Future of Memory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). Esp. the introductions to each of the three sections on memory, testimony and trauma.
Week 7 Comics and Conflict: Witness, Testimony and World Literature? (Dominic Davies)
In this seminar we will explore the seemingly prevalent tendency of the use of comics –that is, sequential art that combines juxtaposed drawn and other images with the (hand)written word – to depict conflict zones in geo-historical areas as diverse as Palestine, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Why have comics, a highly mediated form that draws attention to the contingency of its own perspective, been used to document witness testimonies from war zones across the world? How do comics, constructed from a sophisticated architecture of borders and gutters, communicate these testimonies across national borders, perhaps even forging alternative kinds of ‘world literature’?
Primary Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde (2000), Palestine (2001) Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier, The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2009)
Secondary Ayaka, Carolene, and Hague, Ian eds., Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels (2015) Chute, Hillary, ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative’, PMLA 123.2, 45-65 (2008) ——, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016) Denson, Shane, Meyer, Christina, and Stein, Daniel eds., Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2014) Hatfield, Charles, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005) Mehta, Benita, and Mukherjee, Pia eds. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (2015) Mickwitz, Nina, Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-telling in a Skeptical Age (2015) Worden, Daniel ed. The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (2015)
Week 8 World Poetry: A Case Study from India (Rosinka Chaudhuri)
Here, we will look episodically at the development of modern poetry in India in relation to the world; that is, we shall see how the world entered Indian poetry at the same time as it transformed poetry in the ‘West’. The very word for poet - ‘kavi’ - began to be redefined as the Sanskrit word came in contact with modernity in the nineteenth century, at the end of which we have the phenomenal figure of Tagore, who was perhaps the first ‘World Poet’ recognised as such from East to West. The decades
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of the 1960s-’80s - when Pablo Neruda was common currency and Arun Kolatkar sat at the Wayside Inn in Bombay - to present-day studies of multilinguality and the role of translation shall be explored to devise a notion of poetry in the world over time as it happened in India.
Primary Buddhadeva Bose, ‘Comparative Literature in India’, in Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Vol. 45; see http://jjcl.jdvu.ac.in/jjcl/upload/JJCL 45.pdf Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes,’ in Partial Reccall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012). Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Arun Kolatkar and the Tradition of Loitering,’ in Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008).
Secondary Roland Barthes, ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’ in Annette Lavers and Colin Smith translated Writing Degree Zero (1953; New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and The Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). Bhavya Tiwari, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Comparative World Literature,’ in Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir ed. The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London: Routledge, 2012). Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (New York and Delhi: Penguin, 2008). Laetitia Zechhini, Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) Anjali Nerlekar, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016).
B-Course
MICHAELMAS TERM 2017 WEEK 1-6: Material Texts 1900-present See course details under Material Texts 1900-present (p. 64)
WEEK 7 Monday, 11-1, St Hugh’s College (Venue TBC) Instituting World Literature I (Peter McDonald)
WEEK 8 Monday, 11-1, OUP, Walton Street (use Great Clarendon Street entrance) OUP Archive visit (Martin Maw)
WEEK 2-8: Material Methodology DR Michelle Kelly ([email protected])
Wednesday 9-10, Weston Library An introduction to manuscript study and archive use in world literature, with weekly classes on the transcription, editing and use of manuscript materials. The course will focus on practical transcription skills, and will conclude with a compulsory examination on these methods in week 8. The course is a compulsory component of the B Course for the MSt in World Literature.
Week 1 Introduction Week 2 Manuscript Transcription Week 3 Manuscript Transcription
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Week 4 Manuscript Transcription Week 5 Manuscript Transcription Week 6 Manuscript Transcription Week 7 Mock Examination Week 8 Transcription Examination and Roundtable on the B Course essay
Course materials will be circulated from week to week. Reading Suggestions: Archives, Editing and Textual Scholarship Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and The Construction of Character in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism’, in Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, edited by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. D.C. Greetham, ‘Some Types of Scholarly Edition,’ in David Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland, 1992, pp. 383-417. D. C. Greetham, ‘Textual Scholarship’, in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, edited by Joseph Gibaldi. Modern Language Association of America, 1992, 103-137. Ben Hutchinson and Shane Weller. “Archive Time”. Comparative Critical Studies 8.2-3, 2011: 133-53. Jerome McGann, ‘The Monks and the Giants: Textual Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works’, in The Beauty of Inflections, ed. by Jerome McGann (Clarendon Press, 1988), 69-89. Carolyn Steedman, Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009. J. Stephen Murphy, ‘The Death of the Editor’, Essays in Criticism, 58:4, (2008), 289-310. Gregory Crane, ‘Give us editors! Re-inventing the edition and re- thinking the humanities’, in Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come, (University of Virginia/Mellon Foundation, 2010-03), http://cnx.org/content/m34316/latest/
HILARY TERM 2018
WEEK 1 Tuesday, 11-1, St Hugh’s (Room TBC) The Industry of Postcolonial/World Literature (Peter McDonald) Friday, 2-5pm, Oxford Brookes Oxford Brookes Booker Archive
WEEK 2 Tuesday, 11-1, St Hugh’s (Room TBC) Organisations, Charters, and Literary Internationalism (Peter McDonald)
WEEK 3 Tuesday, 11-1, St Hugh’s (Room TBC) Instituting World Literature II (Peter McDonald)
WEEK 4-6 Tuesday, 11-1, St Hugh’s (Room TBC) Student presentations
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B-Course, Post-1550 The B-Course, a distinctive feature of the Oxford English MSt/MPhil, introduces students to bibliography, manuscript studies, textual scholarship and book history.
In Michaelmas Term, the B-Course is divided into four sub-courses: 1550-1700, 1700-1830, and post-1900, all of which are described in detail in this booklet. Students should select the B- course that best fits the period-based or thematic strand of the M.St. into which they have been accepted.
The course comprises of a number of elements across Michaelmas and Hilary Terms. Some elements are strand-specific; some address more than one strand in joint sessions; and others are optional.
As well as providing training in research skills that support all written work, the B-Course includes two formal assessments of its own. Period-specific classes in both Michaelmas and Hilary lead to the submission of a 5000-7000-word essay at the end of Hilary. A period-specific class on manuscript transcription and palaeography is assessed by a transcription test. Further details about the B-Course assessments, including dates, are available in the MSt/MPhil Handbook.
Overview All courses listed run for the entire term
Strand Michaelmas Term Hilary Term Palaeography and Codicology Palaeography and Codicology 650-1550 and (Professor Daniel Wakelin) (Professor Daniel Wakelin) First Year Transcription Transcription (Professor Daniel Wakelin) MPhil (Professor Daniel Wakelin) Textual Criticism (various) Textual Criticism (various) Material Texts Transcription Early Modern Textual Cultures 1550-1700 1550-1700 (Dr (Dr Philip (Dr Ben Higgins) Adam Smyth) West) (Optional) Material Texts ‘Issues In 1700-1830 B-course 1700-1830 1700-1830 (Dr Editing’ (Dr Carly Watson) Carly Watson) Transcription (Dr Carly Material Texts (Mr. Clive Watson) 1830-1914 Hurst) 1830-1914 1830-1914 B-course (Dr Carly Watson) Material
Methodology 1900-present Post-1900 B-course (Dr Judith
Material Texts Priestman) Post-1900 (Dr English & American B Course American Chris Fletcher & Material (Professor Lloyd Pratt) Dr Adam Guy) Methodology World Literatures B Course World (Dr Michelle (Professor Peter McDonald – Literatures Kelly) St.Hugh’s)
Hand-press printing workshop Hand-press printing workshop All (optional) (Richard Lawrence) (Richard Lawrence)
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Students will usually take the B-Course classes in Michaelmas and Hilary that cover the MSt. period-strand on which they are registered, but (subject to the strand and course convenors’ permission) they may choose to join another course if it is in the best interests of their research. Class times and locations are given in the Lecture List. Further research skills courses that are relevant for B-Course work are run by the Bodleian Library, the English Faculty Library and Oxford University Computer Services throughout the year. Masterclasses on manuscripts and rare books are run by the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book on Monday afternoons in Michaelmas.
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Material Texts Post-1900 Michaelmas Term Dr Adam Guy ([email protected]) Dr Chris Fletcher ([email protected])
B-Course for students from 1900-present, World Literature in English, American Literature MSt Programmes
The full group will meet in weeks 1, 2, and 6 for lectures. You will meet as two smaller groups in weeks 3, 4, and 5 to enable you to work closely with material from the Bodleian collections. You will be allocated to one of the two smaller groups at the beginning of Michaelmas Term. Times and venues will be confirmed at the start of term.
The B Course begins with Material Texts, providing an introduction to bibliography (the physical and technical details of book-making) and book history as they apply to the study of literature. It includes both the study of books as singular physical objects and as texts that may exist in multiple physical states: as manuscript, print, and digital forms. Weekly two-hour classes during Michaelmas Term will be held in the Weston Library and will each week draw on material from the Bodleian Collections. The course will consist of consists three lectures by Dr Carly Watson introducing the principles of bibliography and textual scholarship, and three sessions designed to introduce potential approaches to research through the handling and discussion of items from the Bodleian’s Special Collections. Some of the questions that will arise over the course of the six weeks include: How do we read and describe materiality? What significances do we attach to particular material features? Are there material features we tend to overlook? To what degree is the process of production legible in the material text? What relationships might we propose between material and literary form? What does it mean to study the history of the book in the digital age?
Before term begins, you should acquaint yourselves with the standard processes of printing a book after 1830 (acquiring manuscript/typescript copy; casting off; composing; printing; proofing and correcting; binding). For this you should consult Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972; reprinted by St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995) **, pp. 189-310.
WEEK 1 Bibliography, Book History, and Literary Study Scholarly work in bibliography and book history seeks to decode the meanings contained in the material form of books. What does this involve? And how can it enhance our understanding of literature?
Required reading Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111 (1982), 65– 83 [available online via OxLIP and JSTOR] Paul Eggert, ‘Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature’, The Library, 13 (2012), 3–32 [available online via OxLIP] D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form’ and ‘The Dialectics of Bibliography Now’, in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–30, 55–76 [available online via SOLO]
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Further reading Craig S. Abbott and William Proctor Williams, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (Modern Language Association, 1985; 4th edn, 2009) David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds, The Book History Reader (Routledge, 2002) Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006) Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Broadview, 2017) Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds, The Book: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2013) G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
WEEK 2 The Material Text From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, printing technology changed very little; the past two centuries have seen the mechanisation of book production and the digital revolution. How have technological developments changed the form of printed texts? And how can we describe and interpret the physical forms of printed books?
Required reading Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word, 2nd edn (Hartley & Marks, 1999), pp. 191–300 [available online at https://archive.org/details/robert-bringhurst-warren- chappell-a-short-history-of-the-printed-word]
Further reading Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton University Press, 1949; repr. St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994) Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (University of Chicago Press, 1994) Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Clarendon Press, 1972; repr. Oak Knoll Press, 1995), especially pp. 189–296 Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton, eds, Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Book Jackets, Blurbs, and Bibliographers’, The Library, 26 (1971), 91–134 [available online via OxLIP]
WEEK 3 An introduction to Special Collections at the Bodleian. Topic TBC.
WEEK 4 (Wed 10-12 or Thurs 10-12, Weston Library Visiting Scholars Centre) An introduction to Special Collections at the Bodleian. Topic TBC.
WEEK 5 (Wed 10-12 or Thurs 10-12, Weston Library Visiting Scholars Centre) An introduction to Special Collections at the Bodleian. Topic TBC.
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WEEK 6 Textual Criticism and Editing The materiality of texts—their existence in multiple copies, which can differ in a wide variety of ways—poses a challenge for editors. This session will introduce some of the theories that editors have developed to deal with the problems of material texts.
Required reading W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–1), 19–36 [available online via OxLIP and JSTOR] Jack Stillinger, ‘A Practical Theory of Versions’, in Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 118–40 [available online via SOLO]
Further reading Fredson Bowers, ‘Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text” Revisited’, Studies in Bibliography, 31 (1978), 90–161 Julia Briggs, ‘Between the Texts: Virginia Woolf’s Acts of Revision’, TEXT, 12 (1999), 143–65 Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (University of Virginia Press, 1991) Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2013) [available online via SOLO] D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1992) [available online via SOLO] Erick Kelemen, Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (Norton, 2009) Brenda R. Silver, ‘Textual Criticism as Feminist Practice: Or, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Part II’, in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. by George Bornstein (University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 193–222; repr. in The Broadview Reader in Book History, ed. by Michelle Levy and Tom Mole (Broadview, 2014) G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Editing without a Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 47 (1994), 1–23
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B-Course: Post-1550 Transcription Classes Michaelmas Term
These classes teach how to locate, transcribe, describe and understand manuscripts, with particular reference to the very extensive collections from all periods in the Bodleian Library. They are taught in Michaelmas Term and are held in addition to the main B-course class. Attendance at both is compulsory.
1550-1700: Early Modern Hands (Dr Philip West) A course of eight classes for M.St. students working in the period. The main aims of the course are to enable students to read secretary hand fluently, and to describe its forms; to enable students to transcribe hands using semi-diplomatic conventions; and to explain scribal features of early modern manuscript writing. Students will learn how to find and use manuscripts in Oxford. There will be a transcription test at the end of Michaelmas term.
1700-1830 and 1830-1914: Handwriting, 1700-1900 (Mr Clive Hurst) A course of eight classes for MSt students working in this period. You will be presented with examples of literary hands which will be transcribed in class; there will be three pieces of formal transcription to present during the term, and a final test transcription in the last class. The course is to familiarise you with contemporary hands to enable you to use primary resources more effectively, and to introduce you to some of the problems encountered in editing texts.
1900-present: Material Methodology: (Dr Judith Priestman) The purpose of this part of the M.St. course is to familiarize postgraduates with some of the techniques and methodologies involved in researching primary sources, principally manuscripts and archives. Students are taught basic document analysis (how to spot a forgery; date paper &c) and offered one practical session in the Bodleian’s Conservation workshops, but the main emphasis of the course is on transcribing and editing manuscripts, where transcription is understood to be a tool for analysing an author’s compositional technique. A transcription test is set in Week 8, which students are required to pass, as set out in the current edition of the Exam Regulations.
English and American and World Literatures: Material Methodology (Dr Michelle Kelly) An introduction to manuscript study and archive use in world literature, with weekly classes on the transcription, editing and use of manuscript materials. The course will focus on practical transcription skills, and will conclude with a compulsory examination on these methods in week 8. The course is a compulsory component of the B Course for the M.St. in World Literature and the M.St. in English and American.
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M.St. Strands post-1550 - (optional) B Course Option: Issues in Editing – Hilary Term
Dr Carly Watson ([email protected])
This optional series of workshops is open to all M.St. students working on literature post-1550 who are interested in offering a commentary on a newly edited text, or on a text in a published edition, as the B Course essay (for more on the forms the B Course essay can take, see Appendix 2 of the M.St. Handbook). Each week an aspect of editing will be introduced and examples will be provided for discussion; students will also have the opportunity to discuss practical issues and problems arising from the texts they choose to work on.
Course Outline
Week 1 Types of edition
Week 2 Copy-text and variants
Week 3 Plural versions
Week 4 Annotation
Week 5 Editing in the digital age
Week 6 Writing the commentary
Selected Reading
Stephen Barney, ed., Annotation and its Texts (Oxford University Press, 1991) George Bornstein, ‘What Is the Text of a Poem by Yeats?’, in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. by George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 167–93 Fredson Bowers, ‘Greg’s “Rationale of Copy-Text” Revisited’, Studies in Bibliography, 31 (1978), 90–161 Julia Briggs, ‘Between the Texts: Virginia Woolf’s Acts of Revision’, TEXT, 12 (1999), 143–65 Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (University of Virginia Press, 2009) Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (University of Virginia Press, 1991)
Gregory Crane, ‘Give Us Editors! Re-inventing the Edition and Re-thinking the Humanities’, in The Shape of Things to Come, ed. by Jerome J. McGann (Rice University Press, 2010), pp. 81–97; online at
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W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–1), 19–36 Ian Jack, ‘Novels and those “Necessary Evils”: Annotating the Brontës’, Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982), 321–37 Harold Love, ‘Editing Scribally Published Texts’, in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 313–56 [available online via SOLO] Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (Routledge, 1996) [available online via SOLO] Jerome J. McGann, ‘What Is Critical Editing?’, TEXT, 5 (1991), 15–30; repr. in The Textual Condition (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 48–68 J. Stephen Murphy, ‘The Death of the Editor’, Essays in Criticism, 58 (2008), 289–310 Peter L. Shillingsburg, Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (University of Michigan Press, 1997) Martha Nell Smith, ‘Electronic Scholarly Editing’, in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Blackwell, 2004), pp. 306–22 [available online via SOLO] Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authority and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford University Press, 1991) [available online via SOLO] Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford University Press, 1994) [available online via SOLO] G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Editing without a Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 47 (1994), 1–23 Dirk Van Hulle, Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann (University of Michigan Press, 2004) [available online via SOLO]
Selected Editions and Text Archives
The following resources offer models of editorial practice that may be useful to you as you develop your own work.
Print editions
David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, gen. eds, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge University Press, 2012); accompanied by an online edition with additional archival and contextual material, available via SOLO Fredson Bowers, ed., The Works of Stephen Crane, 10 vols (University of Virginia Press, 1969–75) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. by Simon Gatrell and Juliet Grindle (Clarendon Press, 1983) Claude Rawson et al., gen. eds, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge University Press, 2008–); accompanied by the Jonathan Swift Archive
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Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds, The William Blake Archive
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C-Course Descriptions - Michaelmas Term You may select any C-Course
Placing Chaucer Dr Marion Turner ([email protected])
This course focuses on Chaucer’s writings, exploring his texts in various cultural and spatial contexts. Chaucer had roots in the city and in the court; he lived in a mercantile house, in aristocratic and royal households, in private rooms on the walls of London, and in Kent. He also travelled extensively across Europe as a soldier, diplomat, and messenger, and picked up all kinds of manuscripts on his journeys. He worked closely with merchants who were involved in the complicated global trade of things, including spices, fabrics, and indeed slaves. Different spaces, places, and structures influenced his writings in myriad ways: the changing nature of private space at this time, for instance, affected the kinds of spatial imagery used to construct the self; a chamber had particular cultural and psychological resonance in the fourteenth century. This course engages with Chaucer’s works as a whole and also covers late-fourteenth century politics, economics, and social relations more generally. We will also consider relevant theoretical approaches, drawing on texts including Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Michel de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City,’ as well as engaging with current trends in research such as the history of objects.
Week 1: Chaucer and the Court: Book of the Duchess; Prologue to the Legend of Good Women; ‘Manciple’s Tale,’ To Rosemund
We’ll discuss Chaucer’s early and ongoing connections with great households and the court, his use of the poetry of Froissart, de la Mote, and Deschamps, his real and imagined relationships with patrons and quasi-patrons, and his depiction of what it means to be a court poet. An important context is the changing nature of the court across Chaucer’s lifetime; we’ll discuss Richard’s later ‘tyranny’ and look at images of the Wilton Diptych and Westminster portrait.
Week 2: Chaucer and the chamber: Troilus and Criseyde, dream visions
The chamber, the private room, had a particular importance at a time when the idea of the private was changing. Domestic architecture and use of space was quickly developing at this time – and the idea of the private was scrutinized, often with hostility. We’ll discuss the tension between the private and the public, the relationship between psychological interiority and the use of interior space, and the precise ways in which Chaucer depicts rooms and interiority.
Week 3: Chaucer in London and Westminster: House of Fame, ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ Parliament of Fowls, ‘Cook’s Tale,’ ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.’
We’ll explore Chaucer’s varying – and often oblique – depiction of London; his movement between court and city in his life; his refracted descriptions of his own life in the counting-house at the wool quay; his reference to the Great Revolt. We will also discuss his depiction of parliament, especially in the Parliament of Fowls, and the ways in which the changing English parliament provided a key backdrop for the development of the Tales.
Week 4: Chaucer outside: Lenvoy to Scogan, Former Age, ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ Prologue to the Legend of Good Women
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Enclosed gardens, dangerous faerie countryside, deserts, the end of the Thames...Outside places are sometimes bounded structures in Chaucer’s poetry, connected with intimate coterie poetry and erotic court games. At other times they are places of adventure or exile, borderlands defined by their relationship with the centre; they can also symbolise spaces of the mind. We will also explore the connection between outside space and gender: the garden often represents the female body; the forest can be the place of rape.
Week 5: Chaucer in France and Italy: ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ ‘Knight’s Tale,’ Tale of Melibee, Complaint to Venus
This week’s class focuses on the different meanings that some parts of Europe had for Chaucer and how he reflects this in some Canterbury Tales: we’ll think about tyrannical Lombardy, Boccaccio’s Italy, the art of Florence, the France of the Hundred Years’ War, Chaucer’s personal engagement with poets including Deschamps. Chaucer’s journeys in Europe allowed him to experience varying political systems and to encounter dynamic new literature – European locations in the tales build on many of these experiences, and draw an imaginative map of Chaucer’s Europe.
Week 6: Chaucer, North Africa, and beyond: ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’ ‘Prioress’s Tale,’ ‘Squire’s Tale,’ Treatise on the Astrolabe
Chaucer, like all men and women of his class, was in frequent contact with the countries of Africa and Asia through the trade in spices and fabrics; indeed, as a London merchant’s son Chaucer was especially in touch with the trade networks of medieval Europe. He also engaged with Islamic learning, and himself visited multi-cultural Navarre and the slave-markets of Genoa. How does he depict ‘exotic’ places in his passages of description? What did Carthage or Syria mean to Chaucer? And how does he depict other religions in the Tales?
Preliminary Reading:
Key Primary Texts: the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Canterbury Tales, Lenvoy to Scogan, The Former Age, To Rosemunde, the Complaint to Venus, the Treatise on the Astrolabe are all key texts and should be read in advance in the Riverside Chaucer.
Initial Secondary Reading (useful to look at some of this before term starts if you can)
Bale, Anthony, ‘A maner Latyn corrupt: Chaucer and the Absent Religions,’ in Helen Phillips (ed). Chaucer and Religion (Brewer, 2010), pp. 52-64
Barr, Helen, ‘The Regal Image of Richard II and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,’ in Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (OUP, 2001)
Brodie, Saul, ‘Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,’ Speculum 73 (1998): 115-140
Butterfield, Ardis (ed.), Chaucer and the City (Brewer, 2006)
Butterfield, Ardis, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years’ War (OUP, 2009)
Green Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980)
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Kowaleski, Maryanne and P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (CUP, 2008)
Simpson, James, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer,’ in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (Yale, 2005)
Staley, Lynn, ‘Enclosed Spaces,’ in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds.) Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (OUP, 2010), pp. 113-134
Turner, Marion, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (OUP, 2007)
Turner, Marion (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) [esp. essays on public interiorities, authorship, audience, city]
Turner, Marion, ‘Chaucer,’ in Oxford Handbooks Online, ed. James Simpson (OUP, 2015)
Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1999)
Wallace, David, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Benn (Wiley Blackwell, 2004)
Wallace, David (ed), Europe: A Literary History 1348-1418, 2 vols (OUP, 2016)
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After The Conquest: Reinventing Fiction and History Dr Laura Ashe ([email protected])
This course will consider the dramatic literary developments of the post-Conquest period, in terms of the cultural, political and ideological challenges of Norman England. It will include the birth of the romance genre, the development of fictional narrative, and of life-writing, and the emergence of such cultural phenomena as chivalry, written interiority and individuality, and the elevation of heterosexual love. Texts considered will include Latin, insular French and Old and Middle English (all of which can be studied in parallel text and translation): chronicles, lives of saints and kings, foundation myths and pseudo-histories; insular and continental romances and lais, such as the various versions of the Tristan legend, the Arthurian romance, and the romances of ‘English’ history.
Texts are to be chosen by agreement from amongst those listed; the secondary reading lists are inclusive, not prescriptive, and intended to aid in the process of writing the final course essay.
1. Historiography and myth: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae; Wace’s Brut; Roman d’Eneas. 2. Fictional romance and the rise of chivalry: Chrétien de Troyes, Erec, Yvain, Lancelot, Cligès; Le Roman des eles and Ordene de chevalerie. 3. Historical romance and the rise of the king: (from) Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Romance of Horn, Lai d’Haveloc, Layamon’s Brut. 4. Love, selfhood, and suffering: (from) Marie de France’s Lais, Thomas’s Tristran, the Ancrene Wisse. 5. Life writing: (from) Vita Ædwardi, Life of Christina of Markyate, Lives of Thomas Becket, History of William Marshal, Vita Haroldi. 6. Developments in romance: (from) Beroul’s Tristan, the Folies Tristan; Gui de Warewic, Boeve de Haumtoune; Havelok; King Horn; Sir Orfeo.
1. Historiography and myth Texts Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. by Michael A. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Boydell, 2007); also trans. Lewis Thorpe (from Acton Griscom, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (London, 1929)), The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966) Wace, Roman de Brut, ed./trans. Judith Weiss, 2nd edn (Exeter, 2002) Eneas: Roman du XIIe siècle. Classiques français du moyen âge 44, 62, ed. by J.-J. Salverda de Grave, 2 vols. (Paris, 1925–9); trans. John A. Yunck, Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance (New York, 1974), available online through OULS. Parallel OF/ModF edition Le Roman d’Eneas, ed. by Aimé Petit (Paris, 1997)
Criticism Ashe, Laura, Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (Cambridge, 2007) Baswell, Christopher, ‘Men in the Roman d’Eneas: The Construction of Empire’, in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. by Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 149–68 ------, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995) ------, ‘Marvels of translation and crises of transition in the romances of Antiquity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge, 2000), 29–44 Blacker, Jean, ‘Transformations of a theme: The depoliticization of the Arthurian World in the Roman de Brut’, in The Arthurian Tradition: Essays in Convergence, ed. by Mary Flowers Braswell and John Bugge (Tuscaloosa, 1988), 54–74, 204–9 ------,‘“Ne vuil sun livre translater”: Wace’s Omission of Merlin’s Prophecies from the Roman de Brut’, in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays ANTS OPS 2, ed. by Ian Short (London, 1993), 49–59
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------, ‘Will the Real Brut Please Stand Up? Wace’s Roman de Brut in Anglo-Norman and Continental Manuscripts’, Text 9 (1996), 175–86 ------, ‘Where Wace Feared to Tread: Latin Commentaries on Merlin’s Prophecies in the Reign of Henry II’, Arthuriana 6.1 (1996), 36–52 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford, 1997) Bono, Barbara J., Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley, 1984) Burgwinkle, William, ‘Knighting the Classical Hero: Homo/Hetero Affectivity in Eneas’, Exemplaria 5 (1993), 1–43 Caldwell, Robert A., ‘Wace’s Roman de Brut and the Variant Version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae’, Speculum 31 (1956), 675–82 Cormier, Raymond J., One Heart, One Mind: The Rebirth of Virgil’s Hero in Medieval French Romance. Romance Monographs 3 (University MS, 1973) Crick, Julia, ‘The British Past and the Welsh Future: Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur of Britain’, Celtica 23 (1999), 60–75 Dalton, Paul, ‘The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 688-712 Desmond, Marylinn, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis, 1994) Echard, Siân, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1998) Eley, Penny, ‘The Myth of Trojan Descent and Perceptions of National Identity: The Case of Eneas and the Roman de Troie’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991), 27–40 Faral, E., ‘Ovide et quelques autres sources du Roman d’Eneas’, Romania 40 (1911), 161–234 Flint, Valerie I. J., ‘The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion’, Speculum 54 (1979), 447–68 Gaunt, Simon, ‘From Epic to Romance: Gender and Sexuality in the Roman d’Eneas’, in Romanic Review 83 (1992), 1–27 ------, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 1995) Gillingham, John, ‘The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000), 19–39 Hanning, Robert W., The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966) Ingham, Patricia Clare, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, 2001), chapter one Ingledew, Francis, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum 69 (1994), 665–704 Leckie, R. William, The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the periodization of insular history in the twelfth century (Toronto, 1981) Le Saux, Françoise H. M., A Companion to Wace (Cambridge, 2005) Mora-Lebrun, Francine, L’“Enéide” médiévale et la naissance du roman (Paris, 1994) Nichols, Stephen G., ‘Amorous Imitation: Bakhtin, Augustine, and Le Roman d’Enéas’, in Romance: Generic Transformationfrom Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover NH, 1985), 47-73 Noble, James, ‘Patronage, Politics, and the Figure of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laȝamon’, in The Arthurian Yearbook II, ed. by Keith Busby (New York, 1992), 159–78 Nolan, Barbara, ‘Ovid’s Heroides Conceptualized: Foolish Love and Legitimate Marriage in the Roman d’Eneas’, Mediaevalia 13 (1987), 158–87 Otter, Monika, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill, 1996)
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Patterson, Lee, ‘Virgil and the Historical Consciousness of the Twelfth Century’, in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, 1987), 157–95 Petit, Aimé, ‘Eneas dans le “Roman d’Eneas”’, Moyen Age 96 (1990), 67–79 Schichtman, Martin, and Laurie Finke, ‘Profiting from the Past: History as Symbolic Culture in the Historia regum Britanniae’, Arthurian Literature 12 (1993), 1–35 Southern, R.W, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 1. The Classical Tradition, from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth’, TRHS 5th ser., 20 (1970), 173–96 Warren, Michelle R., History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis, 2000)
2. Fictional romance and the rise of chivalry Texts Chrétien de Troyes, Erec & Enide; Cligès; Lancelot, or Le chevalier de la charrette; Yvain, or Le chevalier au Lion. Various editions: parallel OF/ModF text in Livre de Poche (Paris, 1994); English translation by W.W. Kibler and Carleton Carroll (Penguin, 1991) Raoul de Houdenc, Le Roman des eles; The Anonymous Ordene de chevalerie, ed./trans. Keith Busby (J. Benjamins, 1983)
Criticism Auerbach, Erich, ‘The Knight sets forth’, in Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), 123– 42 Burgess, Glynn S., Chrétien de Troyes: Erec et Enide, Critical Guides to French Texts 32 (London, 1984) Busby, Keith, Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval (Le Conte du Graal) Critical Guides to French Texts 98 (London, 1993) Duggan, Joseph J., The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) Frappier, Jean, Chrétien de Troyes (1968); trans. R.J. Cormier (Athens, OH, 1984) Green, D. H., The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 (Cambridge, 2002) Haidu, Peter, Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes: Irony and Comedy in Cligès and Perceval (Geneva: Droz, 1968) Hunt, Tony, Chrétien de Troyes: Yvain Critical Guides to French Texts 55 (London, 1986) Maddox, D. L. The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions (Cambridge, 1991) Jackson, W. T. H., ‘The Nature of Romance’, Yale French Studies 51 (1974), 12–25 Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Origins of Courtliness: civilizing trends and the formation of courtly ideals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia, 1985) Kaeuper, Richard W., Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999) ------, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, 2009) Keen, Maurice, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) Kelly, D., ed., The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: A Symposium (Lexington KY, 1985) Lacy, Norris J., and Joan Tasker Grimbert, eds, A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 2005) Nolan, E. Peter, ‘Mythopoetic Evolution: Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, Cligès and Yvain’, Symposium 25 (1971), 139–61 Noble, James, ‘Patronage, Politics, and the Figure of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon’, in The Arthurian Yearbook II, ed. by Keith Busby (New York, 1992), 159–78 Patterson, Lee, Negotiating the Past (Madison, 1987) Shirt, David J., ‘Cligès: Realism in Romance’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977), 368– 80 Topsfield, Leslie, Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian Romances (Cambridge, 1981)
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3. Historical romance and the rise of the king Texts Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, ed./trans. Ian Short (OUP, 2009) Le Lai d’Haveloc. In Le Lai d’Haveloc and Gaimar’s Haveloc Episode, ed. by Alexander Bell (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1925). Trans. Judith Weiss, The Birth of Romance: An Anthology (London: Everyman, 1992; rev. edn Tempe AZ: FRETS, 2009), 141–58. Thomas, The Romance of Horn, ed. by Mildred K. Pope, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, for the Anglo- Norman Text Society, 1955 –64). Trans. Judith Weiss. The Birth of Romance, 1-120. Layamon, Brut, ed./trans. W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Harlow, 1995)
Criticism Ashe, Laura, Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 3 ------, ‘The Anomalous King of Conquered England’, in Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, ed. Charles Melville and Lynette Mitchell (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 173-93 ------, ‘The Hero and his Realm in Medieval English Romance’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance 6, ed. by Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge, 2008), 129-47. ------, ‘‘Exile-and-return’ and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance’, Literature Compass 3 (2006), 300-17 Burnley, J. D., ‘The “Roman de Horn”: its Hero and its Ethos’, French Studies 32 (1978), 385–97 Crane, Susan, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley, 1986) Damian-Grint, Peter, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Woodbridge, 1999) Donoghue, Daniel, ‘Layamon’s Ambivalence’, Speculum 65 (1990), 537-563 Field, Rosalind, ‘Romance as History, History as Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1991), 163–73 ------, ‘Romance in England, 1066–1400’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), 152–76 ------, ‘The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 41–53 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Layamon’s Gift’, PMLA 121 (2006), 717-734 Gillingham, John, ‘Gaimar, the Prose Brut and the making of English history’, in L’Histoire et les nouveaux publics dans l’Europe médiévale (XIIIe–XVe siècles). Histoire ancienne et médiévale 41, ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris, 1997), 165–76 (repr. in John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000), 113–22) Le Saux, Françoise H.M., Layamon’s Brut: The Poem and its Sources (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1989) ------, ed., The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1994) Sheppard, Alice, ‘Of this is a king's body made: lordship and succession in Lawman's Arthur and Leir’, Arthuriana 10:2, (2000), 50-65 Stein, Robert M., ‘Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical Explanation in William of Malmesbury and Layamon’s Brut’, in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. by Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia, 1998), 97–115 Tiller, Kenneth J., ‘The truth "bi Arðure þan kinge": Arthur's role in shaping Lawman's vision of history’, Arthuriana 10:2, (2000), 27-49 Weiss, Judith, 'The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance', in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1991), 149-61 ------, ‘Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field (Cambridge, 1999), 1–13
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4. Love, selfhood, and suffering Texts Marie de France, Lais, ed. by Jean Rychner. Les Classiques Français de Moyen Age 93 (Paris: Champion, 1968); trans. by Glyn S. Burgess, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003) Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2 vols (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1998) [Contains all the OF Tristan poems in parallel text/translation: Thomas of Britain, Béroul, Marie de France, the Folies, etc] Thomas, Les Fragments du Roman de Tristan, ed. by Bartina Wind (Geneva: Droz, 1960), trans. by A. T. Hatto in Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan, with the Tristran of Thomas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 301-54 Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with variants from other manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2005), trans. Hugh White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993)
Criticism Adams, Tracy, “ ‘Pur vostre cor su jo em paine’: The Augustinian Subtext of Thomas’s Tristan,” Medium Aevum 68 (1999), 278–91 ------, “Arte regendus amor”: suffering and sexuality in Marie de France's Lai de Guigemar’, Exemplaria 17 (2005), 285-315 Ashe, Laura, ‘The Meaning of Suffering: Symbolism and anti-symbolism in the death of Tristan’, in Writers of the reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays, ed. by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 221-38 Blakeslee, Merrit R., Love’s Masks: Identity, Intertextuality, and Meaning in Old French Tristan Poems (Woodbridge, 1989) Bromily, Geoffrey N., Thomas's Tristan and the Folie Tristan d'Oxford. Critical Guides to French Texts 61 (London, 1986) Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth- Century French Fictions (Philadelphia, 1993) ------, “The Representation of the Lovers’ Death: Thomas’s Tristan as Open Text,” in Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook, ed. by Joan Tasker Grimbert (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 95–109 Burgess, Glyn S., The ‘Lais’ of Marie de France - Text and Context (Manchester, 1987) ------, Marie de France: An Analytical Bibliography, supplement no. 3 (Cambridge, 2007) Clifford, Paula M., Marie de France: Lais. Critical Guides to French Texts 16 (London, 1982) Cooper, Helen, ‘Love before Troilus’, in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. by Helen Cooney (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 25-43 Ferrante, Joan M., The Conflict of Love and Honor: The Medieval Tristan Legend in France, Germany and Italy (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1973) Georgianna, Linda, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981) Griffin, Miranda, ‘Gender and authority in the medieval French lai’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 35 (1999), 42-56 Hunt, Tony, “The Significance of Thomas’s Tristan,” in Reading Medieval Studies 7 (1981), 41–61 Morris, Colin, The Discovery of the Individual 1050 – 1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987) Ramm, Ben, “Cest cunte est mult divers”: knowledge, difference and authority in Thomas's Tristan’, Modern Language Review 101 (2006), 360-374 Spence, Sarah, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996)
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5. Life writing Texts Vita Ædwardi: The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster, ed./trans. Frank Barlow (Oxford: OUP, 1992) Matthew Paris, La estoire de Seint Aedward le rei, ed. by K. Y. Wallace (Oxford, 1983); trans. Thelma Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, The History of Saint Edward the King (Tempe AZ, 2008) Guernes de Pont-Sainte Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr, ed. E.Walberg (Lund, Denmark, 1922); trans. Ian Short, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse (Toronto, 2013) Edward Grim, William FitzStephen, and Herbert of Bosham, in James Craigie Robertson, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury: Rolls Series 67, 7 vols (London, 1965), II.353-450; III.1-154; III.155-464. Lengthy excerpts translated in Michael Staunton, The lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester, 2001) and George Greenaway, The life and death of Thomas Becket (London, 1961) History of William Marshal, ed. by A. J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory, with notes by D. Crouch, 3 vols (Anglo-Norman Texts Society: London, 2002-6) C. H. Talbot, ed./trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate (Clarendon Press, 1959) Vita Haroldi, ed./trans. Walter de Gray Birch (London: Elliot Stock, 1885); available to be downloaded in pdf at www.archive.org
Criticism Ashe, Laura, Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 1 ------, ‘William Marshal, Lancelot, and Arthur: chivalry and kingship’, Anglo-Norman Studies 30 (2007), 19-40 ------, ‘Harold Godwineson’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 59-80 Barlow, Frank, Thomas Becket (London, 1986) Binski, Paul, ‘Reflections on La estoire de Seint Aedward le rei : hagiography and kingship in thirteenth-century England’, Journal of Medieval History, 16:4 (1990), 333-50 Chibnall, Marjorie M., ‘The Empress Matilda as a subject for biography’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. by David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 185-94 Crouch, David, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219 (Harlow, 2002) ------, ‘Strategies of Lordship in Angevin England and the Career of William Marshal’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, ed. by Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, 1988), 1–25 ------, ‘Writing a biography in the thirteenth century: the construction and composition of the “History of William Marshal”’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. by David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 221-35 ------, ‘The Hidden History of the Twelfth Century’, Haskins Society Journal 5 (1993), 111-30 Fanous, Samuel, and Henrietta Leyser, eds, Christina of Markyate : a twelfth-century holy woman (London: Routledge, 2005) Gillingham, John, ‘War and Chivalry in the History of William Marshal’, Thirteenth Century England 2 (1988), 1–13 Grassi, J. L., ‘The Vita Ædwardi regis: the hagiographer as insider’, Anglo-Norman Studies 26 (2003), 87-102 Hahn, Cynthia. 'Proper behaviour for knights and kings : the hagiography of Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans'. Haskins Society Journal, 2 (1990), 237-48 Huntington, Joanna, ‘Edward the Celibate, Edward the Saint: virginity in the construction of Edward the Confessor’, in Medieval Virginities, ed. by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 119-39
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Jordan, Victoria B., ‘The multiple narratives of Matthew Paris’ Estoire de seint Aedward le rei : Cambridge, University Library MS Ee. iii. 59’, Parergon 13:2 (1996), 77-92 ------, ‘Chronology and discourse in the Vita Ædwardi Regis’, Journal of Medieval Latin 8 (1998), 122-155 Keefe, Thomas K., ‘Shrine time: King Henry II's visits to Thomas Becket's tomb’, Haskins Society Journal 11 (2003), 115-122 Matthews, Stephen, ‘The Content and Construction of the Vita Haroldi’, in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. by Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 65–73 O’Reilly, Jennifer L., ‘The Double Martyrdom of Thomas Becket: Hagiography or History?’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1985), 183-247 Otter, Monika, ‘1066: The Moment of Transition in Two Narratives of the Norman Conquest’, Speculum 74 (1999), 565–86 Perrot, Jean-Pierre, ‘Violence et sacré: du meutre au sacrifice dans la Vie de Saint Thomas Becket de Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’, in La violence dans le monde médiéval: Sénéfiance 36 (1994), 399-412 Peters, Timothy, ‘An ecclesiastical epic: Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr’, Mediaevistik 7 (1996), 181-202 Staunton, Michael, ‘Thomas Becket’s Conversion’, Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1998), 193-211 ------, Thomas Becket and his Biographers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006) Stein, Robert M., ‘The Trouble with Harold: The Ideological Context of the Vita Haroldi’, New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998), 181–204 Thacker, Alan, ‘The cult of King Harold at Chester’, in The Middle Ages in the North-West, ed. by Tom Scott and Pat Starkey (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 1995), 155–76 Vollrath, Hanna, ‘Was Thomas Becket Chaste? Understanding Episodes in the Becket Lives’, Anglo- Norman Studies 27 (2004)
6. Developments in romance Texts Béroul, Le Roman de Tristan, ed. by Alfred Ewert (1939; rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), trans. Alan Fedrick (Penguin: London, 2005) Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2 vols (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1998) [Contains all the OF Tristan poems in parallel text/translation: Thomas of Britain, Béroul, Marie de France, the Folies, etc] Havelok, ed. G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); or in Middle English Verse Romances ed. Sands. King Horn: An Edition Based on Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27 (2), ed. by Rosamund Allen (London: Garland Publishing, 1984); or in Middle English Verse Romances ed. Sands. Boeve de Haumtoune, ed. by Albert Stimming (Halle: Niermeyer, 1899); trans. Judith Weiss, Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic: Two Anglo-Norman Romances (French of England Translation Series, 2008) Gui de Warewic, ed. by Alfred Ewert, 2 vols (Paris, 1932-33); trans. Weiss, Two Anglo- Norman Romances. Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)
Criticism Adams, Tracy, ‘Love and charisma in the Tristan et Iseut of Béroul’, Philological Quarterly 82 (2004), 1-23 Bromily, Geoffrey N., Thomas's Tristan and the Folie Tristan d'Oxford. Critical Guides to French Texts 61 (London, 1986) Djordjević, Ivana, and Jennifer Fellows, eds, Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008)
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Hanning, Robert W., ‘Havelok the Dane: Structure, Symbols, Meaning’, Studies in Philology 64 (1967), 586-605 Nichols, Jr., Stephen G., “Ethical Criticism and Medieval Literature: Le roman de Tristan,” in Medieval Secular Literature, ed. by William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 68–89 Noble, Peter S., Beroul's Tristan and the Folie Tristan de Berne. Critical Guides to French Texts 15 (London, 1982) Pensom, Roger, Reading Béroul’s Tristran : a poetic narrative and the anthropology of its reception (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995) Rouse, Robert, ‘English Identity and the Law in Havelok the Dane, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild and Beues of Hamtoun’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005) ------, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005) Smithers, G. V., ‘The Style of Havelok’, Medium Aevum 57 (1988), 190-218 Speed, Diane, ‘The Saracens of King Horn’, Speculum 65 (1990), 564–95 Staines, David, ‘Havelok the Dane: A Thirteenth-Century Handbook for Princes’, Speculum 51 (1976), 602-23 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. by Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 121–34 ------, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996) Wiggins, Alison, and Rosalind Field, eds, Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007)
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The Age of Alfred Prof Francis Leneghan ([email protected])
Outline: King Alfred of Wessex (871-99) has been credited with not only with the invention of English prose but of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and even the idea of “Englishness”. But recent scholarship has questioned the extent of the king’s personal involvement in the so-called ‘Alfredian renaissance’. This course interrogates these issues by exploring the burgeoning vernacular literary culture associated with Alfred’s court and its wider impact on English writing and society in the ninth and tenth centuries. Texts will be studied in Old English, so some prior knowledge of the language will be required. Key texts will include the Old English translations of the following works:
Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy St Augustine, Soliloquies Psalms 1-50 Orosius, Seven Books of History Against the Pagans
We will also look at other important contemporary vernacular works such as Alfred’s Lawcode (Domboc), Wærferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, Bald’s Leechbook and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS A), while considering continental influences on Alfredian writing.
Useful anthologies and translations:
Aykerman, J. Y. et al., trans. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great: With Preliminary Essays, Illustrative of the History, Arts, and Manners, of the Ninth Century, 2 vols (London, 1858). [Full translations of the OE Orosius, Laws (with Alfred’s Preface), Boethius, and Soliloquies; readable as a pdf on solo]. Browne, Bishop G. F. King Alfred’s Books (London, 1920). [Excerpts from Soliloquies, Dialogues, Orosius, Pastoral Care, Bede, Boethius] Cockayne, Oswald, ed. and transl. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (London, 1864-66); repr. (London, 1961). Keynes, Simon and Michael Lapidge. Alfred the Great: Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources (London, 1983). [Excerpts from Boethius, Soliloquies, Laws (without preface), Alfred’s Will]. Swanton, Michael, trans. Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, 1993). [Orosius (Ohthere and Wulfstan), Preface to Pastoral Care, Preface to Soliloquies]. Whitelock, Dorothy, trans. English Historical Documents, Volume 1: c. 500-1042 (London, 1955; 2nd ed. 1979).
Carolingian sources and contexts:
Collins, Roger. Charlemagne (Basingstoke, 1998). Dutton, Paul Edward, ed. and trans. Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Ontario, 1993). King, P. D. Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987). McKitterick, Rosamond. The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989). Nelson, Janet L., ed. and trans. The Annals of St-Bertin: Ninth Century Histories, Volume I (Manchester, 1991). ————. Charles the Bald (London, 1992). Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne (Harmondsworth, 1969). Scholz, Bernhard Walter, trans. Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals; Nithard’s Histories (Ann Arbor, 1972).
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Ullmann, Walter. The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship: The Birkbeck Lectures, 1968-9 (London, 1969).
General Studies: Abels, Richard. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998). Anlezark, Daniel. Alfred the Great (Kalamazoo, 2017). Bately, Janet M. The Literary Prose of King Alfred’s Reign: Translation or Transformation? (London, 1980). ————. ‘Did King Alfred Actually Translate Anything? The Integrity of the Alfredian Canon Revisited’, Medium Ævum 78 (2009), 189-215. Bennett, James R. ‘English Prose Style from Alfred to More: a Bibliography’, Mediaeval Studies 30 (1968), 248-59. Chambers, R. W. On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1957). Davis, R. H. C. ‘Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth’, History 56 (1971), 169-82. Discenza, Nicole G. and Paul E. Szarmach, eds, A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Frantzen, Allen J. King Alfred (Boston, 1986). ————. ‘The Form and Function of the Preface in the Poetry and Prose of Alfred’s Reign,’ in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 121–36. Godden, Malcolm. The translations of Alfred and his circle, and the misappropriation of the past, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 14 (Cambridge, 2004). ————. ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything?’, Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1-23. ————. ‘The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 93-12. ————. ‘Alfredian Prose: Myth and Reality’, Filologia Germanica 5 (2013), 131-58. Karkov, Catherine E. The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 23-52. Pratt, David. The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007). ————. ‘Problems of Authorship and Audience in the Writings of King Alfred the Great’, in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 162-91. Rowley, Sharon M. ‘The Long Ninth Century and the Prose of King Alfred’s Reign’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2015), http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com. Stanton, Robert. The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2002). Thijs, Christine. ‘Close and Clumsy or Fanatically Faithful: Medieval Translators on Literal Translation’, in Transmission and transformation in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Harris and K. Cawsey (Dublin, 2007), pp. 15-39. ————. ‘Early Old English Translation: Practice Before Theory’, Neophilologus 91 (2007), 149- 73. Timofeeva, Olga. ‘Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan: sociolinguistic concepts in the study of Alfredian English’, English Language and Linguistics (2017), 1-26. Waite, Greg. Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature Volume VI: Old English Prose Translations of King Alfred’s Reign (Cambridge, 2000). Whitelock, Dorothy. ‘The Prose of Alfred’s Reign’, in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. Eric G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 67-103.
Major Texts:
I: Old English Dialogues
Editions and translations:
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[Gregory the Great], Dialogues, trans. Philip Lee Warner (London, 1911). Hecht, Hans, ed., Bischof Wærferths von Worcester Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, 5 (Liepzig: 1900; repr. Darmstadt:, 1965).
# Criticism: Godden, Malcolm. ‘Wærferth and King Alfred: The Fate of the Old English Dialogues’, in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson with Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 35–51. Jeffrey, C. D. ‘The Latin Texts Underlying the Old English Gregory’s Dialogues and Pastoral Care’, Notes and Queries 27 (1980), 483-88. Johnson, David. ‘Alfredian Apocrypha: The Dialogues and the Bede’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 368-96. Thijs, Christine. ‘Wærferth’s Treatment of the Miraculous in his Old English Translation of Gregory’s Dialogi’, Notes and Queries 3 (2006), 272-86.
II: Old English Pastoral Care
Editions and translations: [Gregory the Great], Pastoral Care, trans. Henry Davis, S. J., Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation (Westminster, Maryland, 1950). Sweet, Henry, ed. and trans. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, 2 vols, Rolls Series (London, 1887-9).
Criticism: Anlezark, Daniel. ‘Gregory the Great: Reader, Writer and Read’, in The Church and Literature, ed. Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 12-34. Clement, Richard W. ‘The Production of the Pastoral Care: King Alfred and His Helpers’, in Szarmach (1986), pp. 129-52. Cross, James E., ‘The Metrical Epilogue to the Old English Version of Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis’, NM 70 (1969), 381-86. Discenza, Nicole Guenther. ‘The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary’, in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer, Kees Dekker and David F. Johnson (Paris, 2001), pp. 67–81. ————. ‘“Wise wealhstodas”: The Prologue to Sirach as a Model for Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’, JEGP, 97 (1998), 488-99. Earl, Jim. ‘King Alfred’s Talking Poems’, Pacific Coast Theology 24 (1989), 49-61. Frantzen, Allen J.‘The Form and Function of the Preface in the Poetry and Prose of Alfred’s Reign’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 121–36. Godden, Malcolm. ‘Prologues and Epilogues in the Old English Pastoral Care, and Their Carolingian Models’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 110.4 (2011), 441-73. Hinton, David. A. The Alfred Jewel and Other Late Anglo-Saxon Decorated Metalwork, Ashmolean Handbooks (Oxford, 2008). Howlett, David. ‘The Iconography of the Alfred Jewel’, Oxoniensa 39 (1974), 44-52. Irvine, Susan. ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 143-70. Jeffrey, C. D. ‘The Latin Texts Underlying the Old English Gregory’s Dialogues and Pastoral Care’, Notes and Queries 27 (1980), 483-88. Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997).
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Morrish, Jennifer. ‘King Alfred’s Letter as a Source on Learning in England’, in Szarmach (1986), pp. 87-108. Pratt, David. The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007). Schreiber, Carolin. ‘Searoðonca hord: Alfred’s translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 171-99. Shippey, Tom A. ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care’, English Historical Review 94 (1979), 346-55. Szarmach, Paul E. ‘The Meaning of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’, Mediaevalia 6 (192 for 1980), 57-86. Whobrey, William T., ‘King Alfred’s Metrical Epilogue to the Pastoral Care’, JEGP 90 (1991), 175- 86.
III: Old English Boethius
Editions and translations: [Boethius] Boethius: The Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand and S. J. Tester (London, 1983). ————. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (London, 1969). Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds, The Old English Boethius, 2 vols (Oxford, 2010) [prose (B) and prosimetrical (C) versions, with translation and full critical apparatus]. ———— ed. and trans. The Old English Boethius with Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associate with King Alfred, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 19 (Harvard, 2012) [the prosimetrical C-text with facing-page translation]. Sedgefield, Walter John, ed. and trans. King Alfred’s Version of Boethius ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’ (Oxford, 1899).
Criticism: Anlezark, Daniel. ‘Three Notes on the Old English Meters of Boethius’, Notes & Queries 51 (2004), 10-15. Bolton, D. K. ‘The Study of the Consolation of Philosophy in Anglo-Saxon England’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale e littéraire du Moyen Âge 44 (1977), 33-78. Bredehoft, Thomas A., Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009). ————. ‘Old Saxon Influence on Old English Verse: Four New Cases’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. Hans Sauer and Joanna Story with Gabriele Waxenberger, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe, AZ, 2011), pp. 83-111. Discenza, Nicole G. The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English ‘Boethius’ (New York, 2005). ————. ‘The Old English Boethius’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach, eds (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 200-26. ————. ‘Alfred the Great and the Anonymous Prose Proem to the Boethius’, JEGP, 107 (2008), 57-76. Donoghue, Daniel D., ‘Word Order and Poetic Style: Auxiliary and Verbal in the Metres of Boethius’, ASE 15 (1986), 167-96. Frantzen, Allen J. King Alfred (Boston, 1986). ————. ‘The Form and Function of the Preface in the Poetry and Prose of Alfred’s Reign’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 121–36. Godden, Malcolm. ‘Editing Old English and the Problem of Alfred’s Boethius’, in The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference, ed. Donald G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 163-77.
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Irvine, Susan. ‘Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred’s Boethius: a Classical Myth Transformed’, in Studies in English Language and Literature. ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honour of Eric Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (London, 1996), 387-401. ————. ‘Wrestling with Hercules: King Alfred and the Classical Past’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages: the Proceedings of the First Alcuin Conference, ed. C. Cubitt, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 171-88. Lenz, Karmen. Ræd and Frofer: Christian Poetics in the Old English ‘Froferboc’ Meters (Amsterdam, 2012). Marenbon, John. Early Medieval Philosophy (480-1150): An Introduction (London, 1983). ————. Boethius (Oxford, 2003). Metcalf, Allan A., Poetic Diction in the Old English Meters of Boethius, De Propietatibus Litterarum, Series Practica 50 (The Hague; Paris, 1973). Monnin, P. E. ‘Poetic Improvements in the Old English Meters of Boethius’, English Studies 60 (1970), 346-60. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine ‘Listening to the Scenes of Reading: King Alfred’s Talking Prefaces’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green, ed. Mark Chinca and Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 17-36. Payne, F. Anne. King Alfred and Boethius (London, 1968). Sisam, Kenneth, ‘The Authorship of the Verse Translation of Boethius’s Metra’, in Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 293-97. Szarmach, Paul E. ‘Alfred’s Boethius and the Four Cardinal Virtues’, in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. J. Roberts, J. L. Nelson, and M. R. Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 223-35. ————. ‘Alfred’s Nero’, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. C. D. Wright, F. M. Biggs and T. N. Hall (Toronto, 2007), pp. 146-67. Thomas, Rebecca. ‘The Binding Force of Friendship in King Alfred’s Consolation and Soliloquies’, Ball State University Forum 29 (1988), 5-20. Wittig, J. S. ‘King Alfred’s Boethius and its Latin Sources: a Reconsideration’, Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983), 157-98.
IV: Old English Soliloquies
Editions and translations: [St Augustine of Hippo]. Confessions, trans. Philip Burton (London, 1907; repr. 2001). ————. Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Mary T. Clark (London, 1984). ————. ‘Soliloquies’ and ‘Immortality of the Soul’, ed. and trans. G. Watson (Warminster, 1990). ————. The Retractions, The Fathers of the Church vol. 60, trans. Sister M. Inez Bogan, R. S. M. (Washington, 2010). Carnicelli, Thomas A., ed. King Alfred’s Version of St. Augustine’s ‘Soliloquies’ (Cambridge, MA, 1969). Hargrove, Henry L., trans. King Alfred's Old English Version of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, Turned into Modern English (New York, 1904) [in EFL]. [John the Scot/Johannes Scotus Eriugena]. Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature, trans. Myra L. Uhlfelder (Eugene, OR, 2011). [Pseudo-Dionysius/Dionysius the Areopagite]. Mystical Theology and The Celestial Hierarchies, 2nd ed., trans. the Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom and Poem by St John of the Cross (Godalming, 1965). ————. The Complete Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York, 1987).
Criticism:
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Bhattacharya, Prodosh. ‘An Analogue, and Probable Source, for a Metaphor in Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies’, Notes and Queries 45 (1998), 161-63. Chadwick, Henry. Augustine (Oxford, 1986). ————. Augustine of Hippo: A Life (Oxford, 2010). Fanous, Samuel and Vincent Gillespie, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism (Cambridge, 2011). Frantzen, Allen. ‘The Soliloquies: Translation of Augustine’, in his King Alfred (Boston, 1986), pp. 67-88. Godden, Malcolm. ‘Text and Eschatology in Bk III of the Old English Soliloquies’, Anglia 121 (2007), 177-209. Heuchan, Valerie. ‘God’s Co-Workers and Powerful Tools: a Study of the Sources of Alfred’s Building Metaphor in his Old English Translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies’, Notes and Queries 54 (2007), 1-11 Hitch, Susan. ‘Alfred’s Reading of Augustine’s Soliloquies’, in Sentences: Essays Presented to Alan Ward, ed. D. M. Reeks (Oxford, 1988), pp. 21-30. McC.Gatch, Milton. ‘King Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquia: Some Suggestions on Its Rationale and Unity’, in Old English Prose: Basic Readings, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York, 2000), pp. 199-236; also printed in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York, 1986), pp. 17-46. Marenbon, John. Early Medieval Philosophy (480-1150): An Introduction (London, 1988). Potter, Simeon. ‘King Alfred’s Last Preface’, Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Thomas A. Kirby and Henry Bosley Woolf (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 25-30. Pratt, David. ‘Seeing God as He is’, in his The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 308-37. Ritzke-Rutherford, Jean. ‘Anglo-Saxon Antecedents of the Middle English Mystics’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glascoe (Exeter, 1980), pp. 216-33. Sayers, William. ‘King Alfred’s Timbers’, SELIM 15 (2008), 117-24. Teske, Roland. ‘Augustine’s Theory of Soul’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 116-23. ————. ‘Augustine’s Philosophy of Memory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 148-58. Thomas, Rebecca. ‘The Binding Force of Friendship in King Alfred’s Consolation and Soliloquies’, Ball State University Forum 29 (1988), 5-20. Treschow, Michael. ‘Echoes of the Periphyseon in the third book of Alfred’s Soliloquies’, Notes and Queries 40 (1993), 281-87. ————. ‘Wisdom’s Land: King Alfred’s Imagery in his Preface to his Translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies’, in Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to the Rev’d Dr Robert D. Crouse, ed. Michael Treschow, Willemien Otten and Walter Hannam (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 257-84. Szarmach, Paul E. ‘Alfred’s Soliloquies in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (art. 9g, fols. 50v- 51v)’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, vol. 2, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto, 2005), pp. 153-79. ————. ‘Augustine’s Soliloquia in Old English’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 227-55. Waterhouse, Ruth. ‘Tone in Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquies’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York, 1986), pp. 47-86. Wilcox, Margaret. ‘Alfred's Epistemological Metaphors: eagan modes and scip modes’, ASE 35 (2006), 179-217.
V: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS A)
Editions and translations:
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Bately, Janet M. ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Collaborative Edition, Vol 3, MS A (Cambridge, 1986). Smith, A. H., ed. The Parker Chronicle: 832-900 (London, 1935; 1968). Swanton, Michael. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: New Edition (London, 2000).
Criticism: Anlezark, Daniel. ‘Sceaf, Japheth and the Origins of the Anglo-Saxons’, Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002), 31-46. Bately, Janet. ‘The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 60 B.C. to A.D. 890: vocabulary as evidence’, PBA 64 (1978), 93-129. ————. ‘The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle once more’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985), 7-26. ————. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Texts and textual relationships’, Reading Medieval Studies Monograph 3 (1991). Battaglia, Francis Joseph. ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755: The Missing Evidence for a Traditional Reading’, PMLA 81 (1966), 173-8. Bredehoft, Thomas. Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto, 2001). Brooks, Nicholas. ‘Why is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle About Kings?’, Anglo-Saxon England 39 (2010), 43-70. Coz, Yann. ‘The Image of Roman History in Anglo-Saxon England’, in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), Studies in the Early Middle Ages 37, ed. David Rollason, Conrad Leyser and Hannah Williams (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 545-58. Dumville, David N. ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (Leeds, 1977), pp. 72-104. Foot, Sarah. ‘Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles’, in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy F. Partner (London, 2005), pp. 88-101. Irvine, Susan. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, eds. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 344-67. ————. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the idea of Rome in Alfredian literature’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. T. Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 63-78. Jorgensen, Alice. ‘Introduction: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Jorgensen (2010), pp. 1-28. ————, ed. Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Turnhout, 2010). Keynes, Simon. ‘Edward, king of the Anglo-Saxons’, in Higham and Hill (2011), pp. 40-66. Konshuh, Courtnay. ‘Fighting with a lytle werode: Alfred’s Retinue in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, The Medieval Chronicle X (2016), 95-117. Leneghan, Francis. ‘Royal Wisdom and the Alfredian Context of Cynewulf and Cyneheard’, Anglo- Saxon England 39 (2010), 71-104. Meaney, Audrey. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle c.892: Materials and Transmission’, Old English Newsletter 18 (2) (Iowa City, 1985), 26-35. ————. ‘St. Neots, Æthelweard and the Compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Survey’, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1986), pp. 193-243. Parkes, Malcolm. ‘The palaeography of the Parker Manuscript of the Chronicle, Laws and Sedulius, and Historiography at Winchester in the Late Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976), 149-71. Sawyer, P. H. From Roman Britain to Norman England, 2nd ed. (London, 1998). Scharer, Anton. ‘The writing of history at King Alfred’s court’, Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996), 177- 206. ————. ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Continental Annal-Writing’, in Jorgensen (2010), pp. 161-66. Scragg, Donald G. ‘Wifcyþþe and the morality of the Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode in the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle’, in Alfred the Wise, ed. Jane Roberts, Janet Nelson and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 179-85.
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Sheppard, Alice. Families of the King: Writing Identity in the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ (Toronto, 2004). Sisam, Kenneth. ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies’, Proceedings of the British Academy 39 (1953), 287-346. Stafford, Pauline. Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989). Stenton, Sir Frank Merry. Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943, repr. 1971), pp. 319-73. ————. ‘The South-Western Element in the Old English Chronicle’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to T. F. Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925), 15-24, reprinted in Preparatory to ‘Anglo-Saxon England’: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, ed. Doris Mary Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 106-15. Stodnick, Jacqueline. ‘“Old Names of Kings or Shadows”: Reading Documentary Lists’, in Essays in Anglo-Saxon Studies: Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nicholas Howe and Catherine Karkov (Tempe, 2006), pp. 109-31. ————. ‘Sentence to Story: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Formulary’, in Jorgensen (2010), pp. 91-111. Timofeeva, Olga. ‘Alfredian Press on the Vikings: A Critical Discourse Approach to Outgroup Construction’, Journal of English Linguistics 44 (2016), 230-53. Waterhouse, Ruth. ‘The Theme and Structure of 755 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969), 630-40. Wood, Michael. ‘The Making of King Aethelstan’s Empire: an English Charlemagne?’, in Ideal and Reality in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Society, ed. Patrick Wormald, with Donald Bullough and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 250-72. ————. ‘‘Stand strong against the monsters’: kingship and learning in the empire of King Æthelstan’, in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. Patrick Wormald and Janet Nelson (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 192-217. Yorke, Barbara. ‘The Representation of Early West Saxon History in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Jorgensen (2010), pp. 141-59. ————. ‘King Alfred and Weland: traditional heroes at King Alfred’s court’, in Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Cululture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, ed. Charles Insley and Gale R. Owen Crocker (Oxford, 2017).
VI: Old English Orosius
Editions and translations: Aykerman, J. Y. et al., trans. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great: With Preliminary Essays, Illustrative of the History, Arts, and Manners, of the Ninth Century, 2 vols (London, 1858). [Full translations of the OE Orosius, Laws (with Alfred’s Preface), Boethius, and Soliloquies; readable as a pdf on solo]. Bately, Janet M. ed. The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1980). ————. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Collaborative Edition, Vol 3, MS A (Cambridge, 1986). Godden, Malcolm, trans. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44 (Harvard, MA, 2016). [Orosius]. Pauli Orosii Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, ed. , Karl F. W. Zangemeister (B. G. Tuebner, 1889). ————. Orosius: Seven Books of History against the Pagans, trans. A. T. Fear (Liverpool, 2010).
Criticism: Bately, Janet. ‘The Old English Orosius’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 313-43.
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Bately, Janet and Anton Englert, eds. Ohthere’s Voyages: A 9th-century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and its Cultural Context, Maritime Culture of the North 1 (Roskilde, 2007). Discenza, Nicole Guenther. ‘A Map of the Universe: Geography and Cosmology in the Program of Alfred the Great’, in Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and Nicholas Howe (Arizona, 2006), pp. 83-108. Englert, Aanton and Athena Trakadas, eds, Wulfstan’s Voyage: The Baltic Sea Region in the Early Viking Age as Seen from Shipboard, Maritime Culture of the North 2 (Roskilde, 2009). Godden, Malcolm R. ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Goths: rewriting the sack of Rome’, Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002), 47-68. ————. ‘The Old English Orosius and its Sources’, Anglia 129 (2011), 297-320. ————. ‘The Old English Orosius and its Context: who wrote it, for whom, and why?’, Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic 12 (2011), 1-30. Harris, Stephen J. ‘The Alfredian World History and Anglo-Saxon Identity’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001), 482-510; repr. in his Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (New York, 2003), pp. 83-106. Hurley, Mary Kate. 2013. ‘Alfredian Temporalities: Time and Translation in the Old English Orosius’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112 (2013), 405-432. Khalaf, Omar. ‘A study on the translator’s omissions and instances of adaptation in The Old English Orosius: The Case of Alexander the Great’, Filologia Germanica 5 (2013), 195-222. Kretzschmar, Jr., W. A. ‘Adaptation and anweald in the Old English Orosius’, Anglo-Saxon England 16 (1987), 127-45. Leneghan, Francis. ‘Translatio Imperii: the Old English Orosius and the Rise of Wessex’, Anglia 133 (2015), 656-705. Liggins, Elizabeth. ‘The authorship of the Old English Orosius’, Anglia 88 (1970), 289-322. Michelet, Fabienne L. Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006). Nelson, Janet L. ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350-c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 211-51. ————. ‘Alfred’s Carolingian Contemporaries’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh- Centenary Conference, ed. T. Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 293-310. Pezzarossa, Lucrezia. ‘Reading Orosius in the Viking Age: An influential yet problematic model’, Filologia Germanica 5 (2013), 223-40. Potter, Simeon. ‘Commentary on King Alfred’s Orosius’, Anglia 71 (1953), 385-437. Tyler, Elizabeth M. ‘Writing Universal History in Eleventh-Century England: Cotton Tiberius B. i , German Imperial History Writing and Vernacular Lay-Literacy’, in Universal Chronicles in the High Middle Ages, ed. Michele Campopiano and Henry Bainton (Woodbridge and York, 2017). Valtonen, Irmeli. The North in the Old English ‘Orosius’: A Geographical Narrative in Context (Helsinki, 2008).
VII: Old English Prose Psalms 1-50
Editions and translations: O’Neill, Patrick P. ed. King Alfred’s Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms (Cambridge, MA, 2001). ————. ed. and trans., Old English Psalms, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42 (Harvard, 2016). [Facing-page translation of prose and verse sections of Paris Psalter]. [Theodore of Mopsuestia]. Commentary on Psalms 1-81, trans. Robert C. Hill (Atlanta, GA, 2006).
Criticism: Butler, Emily. ‘Alfred and the Children of Israel in the Prose Psalms’, Notes and Queries 57 (2010), 10-17.
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————. ‘“And Thus Did Hezekiah”: Perspectives on Judaism in the Old English Prose Psalms’, Review of English Studies 67 (2016), 617-35. Frantzen, Allen. ‘The Paris Psalter: Translation of the Psalms’, in his King Alfred (Boston, 1986), pp. 89-105. Irvine, Martin. ‘The implications of grammatical culture in Anglo-Saxon England’, in his The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory 350-1100 (Cambridge 1994), pp. 405-37. Jorgensen, Alice. ‘Learning About Emotion from the Prose Psalms of the Paris Psalter’, in Anglo- Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack and Jonathan Wilcox (Farnham, 2015), pp. 127-41. Leneghan, Francis. ‘Introduction: A Case Study of Ps. 50.1-3 in Old and Middle English’, in Atkin, Tamara and Francis Leneghan, eds. The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 1-33. Lerer, Seth. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Nebraska, 1991). O’Neill Patrick E. ‘The Prose Translation of Psalms 1-50’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, eds Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 256-81. ————. ‘Strategies of Translation in the Old English Versions (Prose and Metrical) of the Psalms in the Paris Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds latin 8824’, Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies, Kansai University 48 (2015), 137-71. [available online: http://kuir.jm.kansai-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10112/9288/1/KU-0400-20150401-14.pdf] Orton, Daniel. ‘Royal Piety and Davidic Imitation: Cultivating Political Capital in the Alfredian Psalms’, Neophilologus 98 (2014), 477-92. Pratt, David. ‘Tribulation and Triumph in the First Fifty Psalms’, in his The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 242-63. Toswell, Jane. The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Turnhout, 2014), esp. pp. 75-82.
VIII: Alfred’s Lawcode (Domboc)
Editions and translations: Attenborough, F. L., ed. and transl., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge, 1922). Liebermann, Felix, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, Volume 1: Text und Übersetzung. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903). [Standard edition of Anglo-Saxon Laws]. Preston, Todd, ed. and trans. King Alfred’s Book of Laws: A Study of the ‘Domboc’ and Its Influence on English Identity, with a Complete Translation (Jefferson, NC, 2012). Turk, M. H., ed. The Legal Code of Ælfred the Great (Halle, 1893).
Criticism: Carella, Bryan. ‘Evidence for Hiberno-Latin Thought in the Prologue to the Laws of Alfred’, Studies in Philology 108 (2011), 1-26. ————.‘Asser’s Bible and the Prologue to the Laws of Alfred’, Anglia 130 (2012), 195-206. Frantzen, Allen. ‘King Alfred’s Law Code’, in his King Alfred (Boston, 1986), pp. 11-21. Jurasinski, Stefan. The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law (Toronto, 2015). Pratt, David. ‘The Domboc as a Reorientation of Royal Law’, in his The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 214-41. Richards, Mary P. ‘The Laws of Ine and Alfred’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 58, eds Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2014), pp. 282-312. Stanley, E. G. ‘On the Laws of King Alfred: the End of the Preface and the Beginning of the Laws’, in Alfred the Wise, ed. Jane Roberts, Janet L. Nelson and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 211- 22. Wormald, Patrick. ‘Engla lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994), 1-24.
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————. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, Vol. 1: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999).
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Shakespeare, History and Politics Dr Pauline Kewes ([email protected])
The purpose of this course is to explore the politics of Shakespeare’s histories, Roman plays and tragedies written during the Elizabethan fin de siècle. These works were the product of a climate of uncertainty, political and economic crisis, religious dissension, and international and domestic discord. By summoning the history of medieval England and Denmark and of ancient Rome, Shakespeare engaged, however obliquely, with the pressing issues of the day: the unresolved succession and the concomitant fears of civil war, resistance, usurpation, and royal despotism.
The topical appeal of the plays did not stop them from being hailed by later generations as timeless literary masterpieces. In terms of their political philosophy, they have been variously read as defences of divine-right kingship and as endorsements of republicanism, as exhortations to obedience and as apologies for resistance, as assertions of royal prerogative and as affirmations of the liberty of the subject. They have also been viewed as complex meditations on the nature of power and personal freedom that cannot be reduced to simple statements of political principle. We shall assess the validity of these contradictory approaches by discussing in detail Shakespeare’s treatment of rulers and the ruled in a variety of historical and geographical settings and socio-political spheres: the state, the nation, and the family. We shall not, however, study Shakespeare in isolation: rather, our aim will be to locate his writings in the context that produced them. This is why we shall read them alongside a range of works by his contemporaries: other playwrights and poets, divines, pamphleteers, polemicists, historians, and political figures.
The course will address the following questions: Where does Shakespeare locate the source of political authority in the state? What is the relationship between politics and religion? How does the rise of tyranny, whether political, parental, or marital, shape the application of abstract ideals to present action? Does Shakespeare’s attitude to the acquisition and exercise of political power change by the time he comes to write Hamlet? In what ways does he modify his use of language and dramatic means of expression to deal with a variety of political issues? What are the points of contact between the works of Shakespeare and the more explicitly polemical writings of his contemporaries?
1. The True Tragedy of Richard III and Richard III: Providentialism or Realpolitik?
Supplementary reading: extracts from: Sir Thomas More’s The History of Richard III, Edward Hall’s The Union of Lancaster and York, and 2dn edn of Holinshed’s Chronicles (http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/Holinshed/); Richard Mulcaster, Quenes Maiesties Passage.
Secondary reading:
Axton, Marie, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). Baker, David Weil, ‘Jacobean Historiography and the Election of Richard III’, HLQ 70, 311-42. Burke, Peter, ‘Tacitism, Skepticism and Reason of State’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Burns with the assistance of Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 479-98. Condren, Conal, 'Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England: A Question of Ideology?', in Reason of State, Natural Law, and Early Modern Statecraft, ed. Cathy Curtis and David Martin Jones, Parergon, 28 (2011), 5-27. Doran, Susan, and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Kewes, Paulina, 'History Plays and the Royal Succession', in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 493-509.
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-----‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 170-93. ----- ‘Narrative Historiography and the Rules of Succession’, The Holinshed Project website, http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/paper1.pdf. Lake, Peter, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ----- ‘Tragedy and Religion: Religion and Revenge in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (OUP, 2016). ----- Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Mayer, Jean-Christophe, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). McMillin, Scott and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen's Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Schwyzer, Philip, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). Targoff, Ramie, ‘“Dirty” Amens: Devotion, Applause, and Consent in Richard III, Renaissance Drama, NS 31 (2002), 61-84. Walsh, Brian, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Woolf, Daniel, ‘From Hystories to The Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500-1700’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (The Huntington Library, 2006), pp. 31-67. Worden, Blair, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 1-15.
2. David and Batsheba, Titus Andronicus and the Principles of Succession
Supplementary reading: Peter Wentworth, Pithie Exhortation (c. 1587-93); Robert Southwell, S.J., An humble supplication to her Maiestie (c. 1592); Robert Persons, S.J., Newes from Spayne and Holland (1593)
Secondary reading
Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Religious Factor’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 243-73. Chernaik, Warren, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Doran, Susan, ‘Elizabeth: An Old Testament King’, in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, ed. Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 95-110. ----- and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hammond, Paul, ‘Shakespeare as Collaborator: The Case of Titus Andronicus’, in Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in the Republic of Letters: Essays in honour of Richard G. Maber, ed. Paul Scott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 195-210. Hunter, G. K., ‘A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson’, in An English Miscellany Presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee (Cape Town, 1977), 93-118.
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Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Jackson, Macdonald P., ‘Stage Directions and Speech Headings in Act I of Titus Andronicus Q (1594): Shakespeare or Peele?’, Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996), 134–48. ----- Defining Shakespeare: ‘Pericles’ as a Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 195–203. James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Kewes, Paulina, '"I ask your voices and your suffrages": The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, The Review of Politics, 78: 4 (2016), 551-70. ----- ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit, and the Jacobean Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 47-70. Lake, Peter, ‘Tragedy and Religion: Religion and Revenge in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (OUP, 2016). ----- How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ------Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Manley, Lawrence and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Nelson, Eric, ‘Shakespeare and the Best State of a Commonwealth’, in David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Worden, Blair, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 307-27. Vickers, Brian, Shakespeare, Co-author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 169–80.
3. The Troublesome Raigne of King John, King John and the Rhetoric of Anti-Popery
Supplementary reading: accounts of King John in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1583) and Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587); William Allen, Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588) & A Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, the Vsurper and Pretensed Quene of Englande.
NB Please use George Peele, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (c. 1589-90), ed. Charles Forker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
Secondary reading:
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). Freeman, Thomas S. ‘John Bale’s Book of Martyrs?: The Account of King John in Acts and Monuments’, Reformation, 3 (1998), 175-223. ----- and Susannah Brietz Monta, ‘Holinshed and Foxe’, in in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 217-33. Highley, Christopher, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Holmes, Peter, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Kewes, Paulina, 'History Plays and the Royal Succession', in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 493-509. Lake, Peter, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ----- ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 72-106. ----- ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 59-94. ----- Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lane, Robert, ‘The Sequence of Posterity: King John and the Problem of Succession’, Studies in Philology, 92 (1995), 460-81. Mayer, Jean-Christophe, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Womersley, David, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Vickers, Brian, ‘The Troublesome Raigne, George Peele, and the Date of King John’, in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 78-116.
4. Richard II and Persons’s Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1595): Resistance and Election
Supplementary reading: account of Richard II’s fall and Henry IV’s rise in Holinshed, Chronicles (1587); John Hayward, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (1599): speeches by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Carlisle)
Secondary reading:
Clegg, Cyndia, '"By the Choise and Inuitation of al the Realme": Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship', Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 432-48. Doran, Susan, and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Gajda, Alexandra, ‘Political Culture in the 1590s: The ‘Second Reign’ of Elizabeth’, History Compass, 8/1 (2010), 88-100. ----- The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hammer, Paul, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 1-35. Houliston, Victor, ‘The Hare and the Drum: Robert Persons’s Writings on the English Succession, 1593-1596’, Renaissance Studies, 14 (2000), 233-48 ----- Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Kewes, Paulina, ‘Narrative Historiography and the Rules of Succession’, The Holinshed Project website, http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/paper1.pdf.
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----- 'Marlowe, History, and Politics', in Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 138-54. Kingdon, Robert M., ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550-1580’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 193-218. Lake, Peter, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ----- Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ----- 'The King, (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart's True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s', TRHS, 6th series, 14 (2004), 243-60. Levy, F. J., 'Hayward, Daniel and the Beginnings of Politic Historiography', Huntington Library Quarterly, 50 (1987), 1-34. Mayer, Jean-Christophe, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Salmon, J. H. M, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580- 1620’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 219-53. Smith, Emma, ‘Richard II’s Yorkist Editors’, Shakespeare Survey, 63 (2010): Shakespeare’s English Histories and their Afterlives, ed. Peter Holland. Worden, Blair, ‘Which Play was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, London Review of Books, 25: 13 (2003), pp. 22-4.
5. Julius Caesar, Sejanus and the Fall of the (Monarchical) Republic
Supplementary reading: Thomas Lodge, The Wounds of Civil War; Henry Savile, The Ende of Nero and the beginning of Galba; Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum (extracts).
Secondary sources:
Burgess, Glenn, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 113-39. Chernaik, Warren, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31-56, repr. in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 110-34. Doran, Susan and Paulina Kewes, ‘The Earlier Elizabethan Succession Question Revisited’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 20-44. Gajda, Alexandra, ‘Political Culture in the 1590s: The ‘Second Reign’ of Elizabeth’, History Compass, 8/1 (2010), 88-100. ----- The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hopkins, Lisa, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Kewes, Paulina, 'Henry Savile's Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England', Huntington Library Quarterly, 74: 4 (2011), 515-51. ----- '"A fit memoriall for the times to come...": Admonition and Topical Application in Mary Sidney's Antonius and Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra', Review of English Studies, 63 (2012), 243-64. ----- 'Julius Caesar in Jacobean England', The Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 155-86.
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----- ‘Roman History, Essex, and Late Elizabethan Political Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Oxford University Press, 2016), 250-68. ----- ‘Romans in the Mirror’, in Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History and Politics before the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 126-46. Lake, Peter, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ----- ‘Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the Search for a Usable (Christian?) Past’, in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, ed. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (CUP, 2015). ----- ‘From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his fall: Ben Jonson and the Politics of Roman (Catholic) Virtue’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). ----- ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 87-111. ----- ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I” (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited’, in John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 129-48. ---- ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 59-94. ----- ‘Ben Jonson and the Politics of “Conversion”: Catiline and the Relocation of Roman (Catholic) Virtue’, The Ben Jonson Journal, 19.2 (2012), 163-89. McDiarmid, John F. (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Miola, Robert, 'Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate', Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1985), 271-89. Shapiro, James, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Worden, Blair, 'Ben Jonson among the Historians', in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 67-89. ----- 'Ben Jonson and the Monarchy', in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer (eds), Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 71-90.
6. Hamlet and the Jacobean Succession
Supplementary reading: Daniel Rogers, ‘A discourse touching ye present estate and gouuernement of the kingdomes of Denmarke and Norwegen, with a description of the said realmes, and Dominions appertayninge vnto them. written in September, Anno 1588’, in Diplomatic Intelligence on the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark during the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI, ed. David Gehring, Royal Historical Society, Camden Fifth Series, 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Peter Wentworth, Discourse of the True Successor; Sir John Harington, Tract on the Succession (extracts); Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England (selected letters).
NB It’s important to consider the question of succession in relation to the dating and textual differences between Q1, Q2, and F1. See Introduction to Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), pp. 74 passim, and Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet.
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For a modern edition which allows easy comparison of the three versions, see The Three-text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, ed. Bernice W. Kliman and Paul Bertram; introd. Eric Rasmussen, 2nd rev. & expanded edn. (New York: AMS Press, 2003).
Secondary sources:
Bourus, Terri, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Doran, Susan, ‘Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland 1586-1603’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 203-34. ----- ‘James VI and the English Succession’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority and Government (Ashgate, 2006). ----- and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). de Grazia, Margreta,‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Dutton, Richard, ‘Hamlet and Succession’, in Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England, ed. Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 173-91. ----- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist (OUP, 2016). de Grazia, Margreta,‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Fitzmaurice, Andrew, ‘The Corruption of Hamlet’, in David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, 2001). Hadfield, Andrew, ‘The Power and Rights of the Crown in Hamlet and King Lear: “The King-the King’s to Blame”’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 566-86. Hirrel, Michael J., ‘Duration of Performance and Lengths of Plays: How Shall We Beguile the Lazy Time?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (2010), 159-82: shows that Q2 could have been technically performed in toto. ----- ‘When Did Gabriel Harvey Write His Famous Note?’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 75 (2012), 291-99. Jolly, Margrethe, ‘Hamlet and the French Connection: The Relationship of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet and the evidence of Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques’, Parergon, 29 (2013), 83-105: shows that Q1 is closer to Belleforest than Q2 and F1. Kiséry, András, Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (OUP, 2016). Knutson, Roslyn Lander, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kurland, Stuart M., ‘Hamlet and the Stuart Succession?’, SEL 34 (1994), 279-300. Lake, Peter, ‘Tragedy and Religion: Religion and Revenge in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (OUP, 2016). ----- How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016). ----- Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lesser, Zachary, ‘Hamlet’ After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014): a pretentious study exploring the impact of the discovery of Q1 in C19. ----- and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), 371-420.
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Loewenstein, David and Michael Witmore (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): the chapters by Felicity Heal and Peter Marshall give an excellent a/c of the confessional context. Long, Zackariah C., ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet: Infernal Memory in English Renaissance Revenge Tragedy’, ELR 44 (2014). Mallin, Eric, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995). McCullough, Peter, ‘Christmas at Elsinore’, Essays in Criticism, 58 (2008), 311-32. Petersen, Lene B., Shakespeare's Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-authored Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Scott Kastan, David, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford, 2014). Shapiro, James, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Skinner, Quentin, Forensic Shakespeare, Clarendon Lectures in English (Oxford, 2014). Smith, Emma, ‘Ghost Writing: Hamlet and the Ur-Hamlet’ in The Renaissance Text ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester University Press, 2000). Stafford, Helen Georgia, James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company Inc., 1940). Stern, Tiffany, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text’, Shakespeare Survey, 66: Working with Shakespeare, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1-23: unpersuasive revival of the theory of reporting by audience members. Vickers, Brian, ‘The Authentic and Inauthentic Hamlet’, Editionen in der Kritik, 2 (2008), 15-42: an unreconstructed but pungent take on recent approaches to Hamlets. Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Worden, Blair, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 1-15.
Parliamentary proceedings, royal proclamations & correspondence Elizabeth I, Queen of England, The Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland, ed. John Bruce (London: Camden Society, 1849). ----- The Letters of Queen Elizabeth, ed. G. B. Harrison, (2nd edn., New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968). James VI and I, Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England, during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. With an Appendix Containing Papers Illustrative of Transactions between King James and Robert, Earl of Essex, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society 78 (London, 1861). ---- Letters of King James VI & I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). ----- The Political Works of James I Reprinted from the Edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain, Harvard Political Classics, vol.1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918). ----- Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ---- The secret correspondence of Sir Robert Cecil with James VI. King of Scotland (London, 1766). Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T. E. Hartley, 3 vols (London: Leicester University Press, 1981-95). Prothero, G. W., ed. Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents, 3th edn, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964-69).
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Secondary sources: drama, history, and politics
Bevington, David, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Burgess, Glenn, ‘Becoming English? Becoming British? The Political Thought of James VI & I Before and After 1603’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 143-75. Clegg, Cyndia Susan, ‘“By the Choise and Inuitation of al the Realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 432-48. Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31-56, repr. in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 110-34. ----- De Republica Anglorum Or, History with the Politics Put Back: Inaugural Lecture delivered 9 November 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ----- ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1993), pp. 51-92. ----- ‘The Religious Factor’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 243-73. Doran, Susan, ‘Revenge her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, 85 (2000), 589-612. ---- ‘Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland 1586-1603’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 203-34. ----- ‘Three Late-Elizabethan Succession Tracts’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 100-117. ----- ‘James VI and the English Succession’, forthcoming. Dutton, Richard, ‘The Dating and Contexts of Shakespeare’s Henry V’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino: The Huntington Library Press, 2006). Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (CUP, 2005). Hurstfield, Joel, ‘The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England’, in id., Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London: Cape, 1973), pp. 104-34. Kewes, Paulina, '"I ask your voices and your suffrages": The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, The Review of Politics, 78: 4 (2016), 551-70. ----- 'History Plays and the Royal Succession', in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 493-509. -----‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 170-93. ----- ‘Narrative Historiography and the Rules of Succession’, The Holinshed Project website, http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/paper1.pdf. ----- 'Marlowe, History, and Politics', in Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 138-54. Knowles, Ronald, ‘The Political Contexts of Deposition and Election in Edward II’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 14 (2001), 105-21. Lake, Peter, ‘Tragedy and Religion: Religion and Revenge in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (OUP, 2016). ----- How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2016).
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----- Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Mayer, Jean-Christophe (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), McLaren, Anne N., Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558-1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ----- ‘The Quest for a King: Gender, Marriage, and Succession in Elizabethan England’, Journal of British Studies, xli (2002), 259-90. Skinner, Quentin, Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Puritan Politicians and King James VI and I, 1587-1604’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 21- 44. Nenner, Howard, The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603-1714 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
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2
Milton and the Philosophers Dr Noel Sugimura
This M.St option is designed for graduate students interested in reading and reflecting on the intersection of philosophy and literature in Milton’s poetry, particularly in his magnificent epic poem, Paradise Lost. Although the title of this option is ‘Milton and Philosophy’, the term ‘philosophy’ is used heuristically: we will explore what it means for a poem to be ‘philosophical’ and how different modes of philosophic discourse are present in, or emergent from, Milton’s poetry. In this context, the term ‘philosophy’ will be opened up to include a range of ‘philosophies’, or philosophical commitments (ontological, epistemological, etc), many of which may seem at odds with one another. No previous knowledge of Milton or philosophy is necessary, though the course presumes that you will have read Milton’s Paradise Lost over the long vacation. One substantial aim of this M.St option is to integrate close readings of the poetry with an understanding of Milton’s own historical, political, philosophical, and theological engagements. As such, primary readings are drawn from Milton’s oeuvre as well as major philosophical works (classical as well as early modern). Secondary literature includes seminal studies by historians, philosophers, and literary critics; they are meant to present you with a variety of critical approaches to Milton. I ask that you assess what purchase each of these theories has on Milton’s poetry, including its limitations (if any). Participation in class discussion is mandatory and will revolve around the ‘focus questions’ for each week (given at the end of the reading list under the week in question) or in-class presentations. Please note that the primary reading and recommendations for supplementary reading are given under the week in which those texts will be discussed in class.
Course Outline and Reading List Recommended Texts
For the primary readings in Milton, I would ask that you bring the physical book to class. Recommended editions for Milton’s Comus, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are either The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (Penguin, 1999) OR Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (2nd edition; Routledge, 2006) and The Complete Shorter Poems (2nd edition; Routledge, 2006).
Milton’s prose works are available in the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1953-). Please note that these volumes are gradually being superseded by the more recent Oxford editions (volumes 2 and 7 will be of particular interest to you in this course).
For readings in Aristotle, I recommend The Works of Aristotle, tr. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905-52). As with the other classical texts on this list, the Loeb editions will suffice as well.
For readings in Augustine, a good edition is the City of God, ed. G. R. Evans (Penguin, 2004) or, alternatively, the Loeb edition.
Weekly Assignments Week 1: Comus: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Poetry
Primary Reading Milton, Comus: A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Please also read:
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Aristotle, Rhetoric, I. 3 [forms of rhetoric] and I. 9 – I.15 Cicero, De Oratore book 1 (on rhetoric and pathos). Plato, Gorgias – in its entirety. Warren Chernaik, Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2017), chapter 3, pp.61-85. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ‘Structuring Rhetoric’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley/London, 1993), pp. 1-33 – a good introduction to rhetoric and Aristotle’s view of it and his legacy.
Suggested Reading:
W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (1975; London, 2002). Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA, 2006) pp.1-23 (intro) and ch.1 (on Hobbes). Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: from the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, 1994) pp.185-208 (ch. 7 is on Comus; ch. 8 on PL). Barbara Keifer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, 1985) – especially good for looking forward to PL. --. ‘Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge, 1998) pp.296-320 – see the entire collection for more on the tradition, structure, and politics of the masque as a genre. A. A. Long, ‘Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle’, in From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy (Oxford, 2006) – available also online through Oxford Scholarship Online. William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto, 2008), especially chapters 1 and 4. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria [Institutes of Oratory] – again, the Loeb edition is very good or the text on Perseus (online). It’s worth reading books 1, 2, and 8-10. Eckart Schütrumpf, ‘ No-logical Means of Persuasion in Aristotle’ Rhetoric and Cicero’s De oratore, in Peripatetic Rhetoric after Aristotle, ed. William W Fortenbaugh and David C. Mirhady (New Brunswick, NJ/London, 1994) pp.95-110. Robert Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato, and their Successors (Routledge, 1996).
*We will return to discuss rhetoric in week 5 in the context of Paradise Regained, so it’s worth reading ahead in some of these texts!Focus question for class: ‘What impressed me most deeply about Plato in that book [the Gorgias] was, that it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to me to be the consummate orator.’ (Cicero, De oratore I.xi.47 [Loeb, 1942], pp.35-37.). To what extent can the same assessment be made about Milton’s treatment of Comus in the genre of the masque?
Week 2 Theodicy and Aetiology in Paradise Lost
Primary Reading As you will have read all of Paradise Lost over the long vacation, please reread books 1-3 and book 9 for our class in this week (week 2). Please also read: Aristotle, Metaphysics V.2 and Physics II.3 (on the four causes). Augustine, City of God book xi, chapters 14-15; book xii, chapters 1, 3, and 7; book xiv, chapters 3, 11-19. Warren Chernaik, ‘Introduction’, Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2017), pp.1- 20 -- read this as one introduction to Milton’s religious politics and his prose works alongside the poetry.
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Dennis Danielson, “The Fall and Milton’s Theodicy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge UP, 1999) – also available online (online publication May 2006). Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of Man, pp. 13-55 (God's Attorney: Narrative as Argument’).
Suggested Reading:
John Carey, ‘Milton’s Satan’, in Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge, 1999) pp.160-74; available also through the Cambridge Companions Online. Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge UP, 1982). William Empson, Milton’s God (Chatto & Windus, 1961). Neil Forsyth, ‘The English Church’, in Milton in Context, ed. Stephen Dobranski (Cambridge UP, 2015) pp.292-304. C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1942). Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011) – especially helpful for an understanding of Aristotle’s four ‘causes’ and their history.
NB: A handy introduction to Aristotelian causation is also available in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/
Class Discussions on the ‘origins’ of the Fall: one part of the class will present on and engage in a critique of John S. Tanner, “’Say First What Cause’,” PMLA 103.1 (1988): 1-45 (available through JSTOR), while the other half of the class will examine and assess William Poole’s account in chapter 1: “Causality of Wickedness,” in Idea of the Fall [available also by PDF for distribution via email]. The merits/demerits of each approach along with your own critical contributions with regard to how you understand Milton’s account of the Fall will focus our class discussion.
Week 3 Ontology and Narrative: Chaos and Creation
Primary Reading PL, books 5-7; re-read PL 2.890-967, and PL 3.705-35. Please also read: Aristotle Rhetoric, III, ch. 11. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (DRN), i.1-858, 921-1117; ii.1-181, 541-99, 1023-1175; iii.1-71, 98-109; iv.722-823. Augustine, City of God, bk xi, ch. 17, 18, 22, 23; bk xii, ch. 4 and bk xiii, ch. 24 (creation of humankind). Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, chapter 3 (‘Material Life: Milton’s Animist Materialism’), pp.79-110. David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2017), chapter 11 (‘Matter, Monism, and Narrative: Essays on the Metaphysics of Paradise Lost’).** William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels, pp.89-98 (on ‘monism and dualism’); optional reading on pp.98-105. Christopher Lüthy and William Newman, ‘“Matter” and “Form”: By Way of a Preface’, Early Science and Medicine 2.3 (1997): 215-226. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, chapter 1 (‘The Power of Matter’ and ‘The Vitalist Movement’, pp.8-16 and chapter 4 (‘Chaos, Creation, and the Political Science of PL’), pp.103- 30. Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating (Chicago/London, 1988), ‘Preface, Intro, and Ch. 1’, xi-39.
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Ann Thomson, ‘Mechanistic Materialism vs Vitalistic Materialism’ in Mécanisme et vitalisme, ed. Mariana Saad, La lettre de la Maison française d’Oxford 14 (Oxford: Maison française d’Oxford, 2001) pp.22–36.
**Our focus question for this week will take for its starting point this essay, so please read it with care.
Suggested Reading
Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2004) – especially ch. 5 (and discussion of Hobbes and metaphysics). John Milton, Of Christian Doctrine, in The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 8: De Doctrina Christiana, ed. John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington (Oxford, 2012); also available online (published 2013) at: http://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780199651900.book.1/ actrade- 9780199651900-book-1. See especially the chapters on God, Creation, etc. Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge UP, 2009), especially pp.1-72. Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011) – especially helpful for discussions of form and matter in the early modern period. Lynn S. Joy, ‘Scientific Explanation: Formal Causes to Laws of Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Science: Vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2003) pp. 70-105.
Focus Question: To what extent do you agree with D. Bentley Hart’s reading of Milton’s metaphysic in Paradise Lost? Explain. Ground your discussion in close readings of the poetry as well as your understanding of the poetry’s philosophical and/or theological commitments.
Week 4 Milton’s Metaphysics of Desire: The Nature of the Passions and Experience in Paradise Lost
Primary Reading Reread with care PL, books 1, 2, 4, 8-10 and Milton, Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce, especially book 1 (read with care chapters ii and ch. xiii). Please also read: Augustine, City of God, bk xi, ch. 26-28 (on love and knowledge) and bk xiv, chapters 10, 23-24, 26- 27 (on the passions in a prelapsarian and postlapsarian world); and a short excerpt from On Music 6, 2.3 – 13.38 in Greek and Roman Aesthetics, tr. and ed. Oleg V. Bychkov and Anne Sheppard (Cambridge, 2010), pp.206-18 [also available for distribution via email]. Lucretius, DRN iv. 473-521, 1049-1208. Plotinus, excerpts from the Enneads I.6.1-9, 5.8.1-2, 6.7.22.24-26, 6.731-33, in Greek and Roman Aesthetics, tr. and ed. Oleg V. Bychkov and Anne Sheppard (Cambridge, 2010), pp.185-200 [also available for distribution via email]. Peter Dear, ‘The Meanings of Experience’, in The Cambridge History of Science: Vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge UP, 2003) pp.106-31. Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford UP, 2012) pp.229-72. Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘“Commotion Strange”: Passion in Paradise Lost’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia, PA: Univ of PA Press, 2004) pp.43-68. Harold Skulsky, Chapter 3 (‘The Creator Defended’), in Milton and the Death of Man, pp. 114-171.
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Suggested Reading
Aristotle, Rhetoric book I, chapters 1-2 (on rhetoric and character); Rhetoric book II, chapters 2-4, 5, and 7-11 and Aristotle’s Poetics, chapters 9, 13-14 – these will help you to reflect on how the relationships between the passions/pathos and ethos in relation to moral philosophy and rhetoric. Descartes, Les Passions de L’Âme (1649), or Passions of the Soul [especially article 70 on ‘wonder’]. A good translation of this text is available in The Philosophical Writings [of Descartes], ed. J. Cottingham, R. Steinhoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny, 3 voles (Cambridge, 1985-1991). Plato, Phaedrus and the Symposium (on Eros). Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, ‘Introduction: The Age of the New’, in The Cambridge History of Science: Vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2003) pp.1-17 – good introduction to the ‘new science’.
Focus Question: Aristotle begins his Metaphysics (I.2.982b) by observing, ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced, little by little, and stated difficulties about the greater matters’ (tr. W. D. Ross). To what extent is Aristotle’s claim-which has its origins in Plato (Theaetetus 155d)—equally applicable to Milton’s descriptions of wonder/admiration in Paradise Lost? What does one wonder at, and what other passions (if any) can it arouse?
Week 5 Satanic or Christian Liberty?: Reading the Political Theology of Paradise Lost
Primary Reading PL, books 1-2, 10-12 and all of Paradise Regained (books 1-4) and Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce book 2, ch. 3. Please also read: Augustine, City of God, bk. xiii, ch. 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14-15, 16; bk xiv, chapters 1-9, 11, 15-19, 21 (and reread) 24 and 26; and bk. xxii, ch. 30; and also Augustine, ‘On Free Choice of the Will’ 2.11.31-16.43, in Greek and Roman Aesthetics, tr. and ed. Oleg V. Bychkov and Anne Sheppard (Cambridge, 2010) pp.227-30. Lucretius, DRN, ii. 251-443. Warren Chernaik, Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2017) chapter 3 (‘“Providence Thir Guide”: Providence in Milton’), pp.39-60; chapter 6 (‘Monarchy and Servitude: The Politics of Paradise Lost’), pp.124-42; and chapter 7 (‘God’s Just Yoke: Power and Justice in Paradise Lost’) pp.143-71. Filippo Falcone, Milton’s Inward Liberty (James Clarke & Co Ltd, 2014), chapter 4 (‘Satan’s inward prison’) and chapter 5 (‘Christian liberty in Adam and Eve’). Benjamin Meyers, chapter 1 (‘The Theology of Freedom: A Short History’), in Milton’s Theology of Freedom (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2006) pp.15-52 and chapter 2 (‘The Satanic Theology of Freedom’) pp.53-71. [Also available on ProQuest ebrary].
Suggested Reading
Juliet Cummins, “New Heavens, New Earth,” Milton and the Ends of Time (ch. 10) – on eschatology. Stephen Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007) especially chapters 5, 7-9. Phillip Donnelly, Scriptural Reading, chapter 9 (‘Paradise Regained as rule of charity), pp.188-200. William Empson, Milton’s God, chapters 2 (‘Satan’) and 3 (‘Heaven’).
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Stanley Fish, ‘Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Paradise Regained,’ Milton Studies (1983): 163-85, reprinted in How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), pp.349-90. Northrop Frye, “The Typology of Paradise Regained,” Modern Philology 53.4 (1956): 227-38. Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1966) – a classic study of PR. Peter Mack, History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford, 2011) – gives you the broad sweep for background reading with admirable detail. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge UP, 1999).
William Poole, Milton and the Fall, chapter 4 (‘The Heterodox Fall’), pp.58-83. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge UP, 1995; 1998) – a seminal collection of essays on this topic. William Walker, ‘Milton’s Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration in “A Treatise of Civil Power”, “Of Christian Doctrine” and “Paradise Lost”’, Modern Philology 99.2 (2001): 201– 230.
Focus Question: In your own reading, what type(s) of liberty does Milton’s epic champion? Explain with reference to at least two arguments drawn from the secondary literature.
Week 6 From Paradise Regained to Samson Agonistes: Wrath Returned
Primary Reading Milton, Samson Agonistes. Please also read: Warren Chernaik, Burden of Freedom, chapter 8, pp.181-205. Phillip Donnelly, Scriptural Reasoning, chapter 10 (‘Samson Agonistes as personal drama’), pp.201-27. Stephen Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, chapter 9 (‘“I as All Others”: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes’), pp.237-64. Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable, chapter 5 (‘Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes: the ineffable self’), pp.234-81.
Suggested Reading
Please see the bibliography handed out in class.
Class Presentation: Please choose one aspect of the reading for this week--or, alternatively, from a text listed on the bibliography--and show how your own reading of Samson Agonistes makes an intervention in the field (i.e. by expanding on the critical work with which it is engaged; by disagreeing with it; etc).
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Documents of Theatre History Professor Bart van Es ([email protected])
Some of the most exciting current work on Shakespeare and other Early Modern dramatists is grounded in an awareness of the material documents that surround plays and make them up. What was once thought the preserve of bibliographers and archivists has been taken up by the newly emerging ‘stage to page’ field, and observations about the nature of censorship, co-authorship, and revision, are being placed side-by-side with discoveries about acting, props, and company structure. Yet even now some scholars remain very limited in the range of documents that they use. All too often, critics restrict themselves only to the well-known Shakespeare quartos and his 1623 Folio. Those texts are immensely important, of course, but new criticism requires an understanding of the many, many other theatrical documents that survive – or can be traced – to shed crucial light on the material circumstances of the early modern stage. This course will familiarize you with just some of the documents that can enable us to rethink literary texts: manuscript plays; actors’ parts; scrolls; financial accounts (for playwriting, props and clothes); company information, and the like. In so doing, it will provide information about the way playwrights wrote and rewrote; the way prompters reorganized textual information; the way actors learnt plays; and the way props and other materials became essential parts of the play on the page as well as the stage. Each class will focus on a particular category of material for primary research, and each class will feature a play that can be analyzed in the light of those documents – or, on occasion, that is one of those documents. Our plays will be Anthony Munday et al’s The Book of Sir Thomas More, Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso; John Marston’s The Malcontent; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus; and Shakespeare’s Richard III. The final class will turn to the complete works of Shakespeare. In the light of discoveries made in the previous five classes, we will explore how a knowledge of theatrical documents enables us to rethink how we edit Shakespeare’s plays today. The course, then, sets out to equip students with current page-to-stage criticism, and a wide range of the approaches and resources crucial for independent graduate work. It will enable a richly nuanced and complex sense of how a play came to be written, and how it was manifested on the stage and by whom, thus raising questions about what a ‘play’ actually is.
General Background Reading Gerard Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton UP, 1986) Gerard Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton UP, 1986) John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Orgel Stephen, ‘What is a Text?’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 24 (1981), 3-6 Stephen Orgel, ‘Acting Scripts, Performing Texts’, in Crisis in Editing ed. Randall McLeod (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 251-94 Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2004) Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) Gary Taylor, ‘Revising Shakespeare’, TEXT, 3 (1997), 285-304 Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Week 1: Beyond the play: Contextual Documents Philip Henslowe, who was financially responsible for the Admiral’s Men at the Rose theatre, and whose son-in-law Edward Alleyn was his theatre’s lead actor, has left telling contextual documents about early modern theatre. Using a play for which Henslowe paid for writing, props and revisions, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, we will consider what contextual documents can reveal about plays. Questions raised in the class include: 1) What do financial lists reveal about the theatrical process, and what do they hide? 2) What do Henslowe’s diaries tell us about collaboration and can you trace the result in the two versions of Dr Faustus? 3) How does knowing more about Edward Alleyn affect our reading of Faustus (in one or other form)? 4) How can prop and costume lists help us analyze Dr Faustus? 5) How does the date of publication of the A and B texts of Dr Faustus modify our knowledge of the play’s relationship to Henslowe?
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Primary Texts Faustus: Facsimile 1604 The tragicall history of D. Faustus 1616 The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus.
Faustus Editions Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts (1604, 1616): Christopher Marlowe and his Collaborator and Revisers ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) W. W. Greg, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 1604-1616. Parallel texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950) Henslowe Facsimile Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project: Introduction to the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project Henslowe Editions R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) W. W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907)
Secondary Reading: S. P. Cerasano, ‘Henslowe’s “Curious” Diary’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17, (2005), 72-85 S. P. Cerasano, ‘Philip Henslowe, Simon Forman, and the Theatrical Community of the 1590s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 145-158 Natasha Korda, ‘Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker’, Theatre Journal, 48 (1996), 185-195 Fredson Bowers, ‘Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus": The 1602 Additions’, Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 1-18 Eric Rasmussen, ‘Rehabilitating the A-Text of Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"’, Studies in Bibliography, 46, (1993), 221-238
Presentations Presentation 1: Give an account of the two texts of Faustus (A and B) and theories about their relationship to each other, etc. Use the introduction to Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A- and B- Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) as a source. Presentation 2: Give an account of Henslowe’s ‘diary’: how it’s structured, what kind of information it contains, what we can learn from it, etc. Use S. P. Cerasano, ‘Henslowe's 'Curious' Diary’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17, (2005), 72-85 and R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) as sources.
Week 2: Surviving Documents: ‘Parts’ Work this week will focus on Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, famously sold to two theatrical companies, perhaps in two different forms. A printed text, perhaps corrupt, survives for it, as does a ‘good’ manuscript actor’s ‘part’ (the text an actor received, consisting of his lines and cues) for performance by the great actor Edward Alleyn. That part both provides a variant and reveals crucial information about early modern preparation and rehearsal. Questions for discussion include the following: 1) What does a comparison of play and part for Orlando Furioso tell us about textual circulation? 2) How does manuscript complicate print and vice versa? 3) How do actors’ ‘parts’ relate conceptually to whole plays? 4) What do cues and other features of parts tell us about plays and performance? 3) What might parts tell us about play construction?
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Primary Text: Robert Greene, Orlando Furioso Text W. W. Greg, ed., Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ and ‘Orlando Furioso’ (Oxford: Malone Society, 1922) ‘Part’ W. W. Greg, ed. ‘Part of Orlando’ Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage Plots, Actors’ Parts, Prompt Books, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1. This is an ‘elephant folio’! It is huge – don’t try to take it home! The ‘Part’ of Orlando in Robert Greene’s play Orlando Furioso
Edition Robert Greene, Orlando Furioso in The Plays & Poems of Robert Greene, ed by J. Churton Collins, 2 vols (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1905; repr. 1970)
Secondary Reading David Carnegie, ‘Actors’ parts and the “Play of Poore”, Harvard Library Bulletin, 30 (1982), 5-24 Paul Menzer, ‘Introduction’, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Associated University Presses, 2008) Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, ‘Introduction’, and ‘The Actor’s Part’ Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: OUP, 2007) Tiffany Stern, ‘Actors’ Parts’, Handbook on Early Modern Theatre ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 496-512 Michael Warren, ‘Green’s Orlando: W. W. Greg Furioso’ in Textual formations and Reformations ed. Laurie E. Maguire, Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998)
Presentations Presentation 1: Summary and comment on W.W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ and ‘Orlando Furioso’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1922) Presentation 2: Michael Warren, ‘Green’s Orlando: W.W. Greg Furioso’ in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998)
Week 3: Lost Documents: Scrolls in Printed Texts This week we’ll compare printed texts of a single play, John Marston’s The Malcontent. It was published three times in 1604, once in earlier form and twice in revised form including additions and a new induction by John Webster. Feel free to read the play in a modern edited edition – but be sure to look at both versions of the text on EEBO! We’ll be thinking, this week about scrolls: discrete passages of play that circulated aside from the whole text, like songs, letters, proclamations, bills. Questions for your presentations might include: 1) What do the two versions of The Malcontent tell us about revision? 2) What do the two version of The Malcontent tell us about collaboration? 3) How do ‘scrolls’ relate conceptually to whole plays? 4) How might scrolls and/or variant texts complicate our dating of plays? 5) What do scrolls tell us about the manuscripts that actors and/or printers received?
Primary Texts Facsimiles on EEBO Malcontent 1 The Malcontent. Augmented by Marston. With the additions played by the Kings Maiesties servants.
Editions John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. George K. Hunter, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. W. David Kay for New Mermaids (London: A and C Black, 1998)
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Secondary Reading Charles Cathcart, ‘John Marston, "The Malcontent", and the King's Men’, Review of English Studies, 57 (2006), 43-63 Kevin A. Quarmby, ‘The Malcontent: a Play in Two Forms’, in The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012) Kiernan Ryan, ‘The Malcontent: hunting the letter’ in The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re- Visions ed. T. F. Wharton, T. F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Tiffany Stern, ‘Introduction’, ‘Prologues’, ‘Songs’, ‘Scrolls’ in Documents of Performance (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) Akihiro Yamada, Q1-3 of The Malcontent, 1604, and the Compositors (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1980)
Presentations Presentation 1: overview of the likely textual history of The Malcontent based on the textual introduction in John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. by George K. Hunter, Revels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) Presentation 2: response based on Charles Cathcart, ‘The Malcontent and the King’s Men’, Review of English Studies 57, 43-63
Week 4: Surviving Documents: Plays Work this week will focus on a play manuscript, The Book of Sir Thomas More, which directly features the hands of several playwrights – perhaps including Shakespeare – as well as theatrical personnel and scribes. We will consider the play in facsimile and will ask what editors have made of it. Questions we will consider include the following: 1) What does Sir Thomas More reveal about theatrical revision? 2) What does Sir Thomas More reveal about the nature of collaboration? 3) What questions do manuscript plays for the professional theatre raise about printed plays? 4) What problems do editors confront when faced with a manuscript– rather than a printed – play? 5) Have questions about Shakespearean attribution skewed our understanding of Sir Thomas More?
Primary Texts Facsimiles The Book of Sir Thomas Moore ed. John S. Farmer, Tudor Facsimile Texts, folio Series (1910; repr. New York, 1970) The Book of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. W. Greg for the Malone Society (Oxford, 1911) repr with supplement by Harold Jenkins (1961)
Editions Anthony Munday and others, Sir Thomas More, ed. by Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett for Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2011) Sir Thomas More, ed. Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith in A Thomas More soure Book (Washington, DC, 2004), 66-156.
Secondary Reading Michael A. Anderegg, ‘The Book of Sir Thomas More and its Sources’, Moreana, 14 (1977), 57-62 Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority, and the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 55-60 John Jones, ‘The One Manuscript: Sir Thomas More’ in Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: OUP, 1995) John Jowett, ‘Addressing Adaptation: Measure for Measure and Sir Thomas More’ in Textual Performances ed. Lukas Erne and M. J. Kidnie (2004) Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1997) Eric Rasmussen, ‘Setting down what the Clown Spoke: Improvisation, Hand B and the Book of Sir Thomas More’, The Library, 6th series, 13 (1991), 126-36
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Presentations Presentation 1: the text of Sir Thomas More as presented by Vittorio Gabrieli and Georgio Melchiori, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) with special attention to its claims on dating Presentation 2: the text of Sir Thomas More as presented by John Jowett, Arden Shakespeare (London: Cengage, 2011)
Week 5: Beyond the Play: Companies What does an understanding of the construction and make up of a theatre company tell us about plays? What can we learn by thinking about places of performance? This week we will look at the way specific performance conditions enjoyed by particular companies may have brought about particular kinds of play. Our primary text will be Shakespeare’s Richard III, in all likelihood first performed either by Pembroke’s Men or the Lord Strange’s Men in the years 1592-3. The play exists in a quarto and folio version, with notable differences between them. Questions for presentations might include: 1) how important is company identity to an understanding of plays? 2) how distinct (if at all) were London texts from those used on provincial tours? 3) does it make a difference if an author is also an actor-shareholder in a company? 4) what does the quarto publication of Shakespeare’s texts tell us about him as a ‘literary dramatist’, in the sense of a writer for the page as well as the stage?
Primary Texts The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Q1, 1597) Editions William Shakespeare William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon, Arden3 (London: Methuen, 2009) William Shakespeare, The First Quarto of King Richard III, ed. Peter Davison, New Cambridge Shakespeare: the early Quartos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Secondary Reading Bart van Es, ‘Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist’ in Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 56-78 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ‘The Early Adult Companies’, 33-40, ‘Mobile Staging’, 172-75. Tiffany Stern, ‘The Approved ‘Book’ and Actors’ Parts’, in Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 232-52 David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Presentations Presentation 1: the case for Quarto Richard III as a memorial reconstruction, sourced in Peter Davison’s edition and his article ‘Bibliography; Teaching, Research and Publication: Reflections on Editing the First Quarto of Richard III’, The Library 17 (1995), 1-33 Presentation 2: the case against Quarto Richard III as a memorial reconstruction, sourced in Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: the ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ‘Introduction’, 3-20, and ‘Richard 3’, 299-300, and John Jowett, “Derby’, ‘Stanley’, and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III’, Notes & Queries 47 (2000), 75-9.
Week 6: Shakespeare’s Texts and the Documents of Theatre History In this final class we’ll be looking at the nature and status of the surviving texts of Shakespeare’s plays. We will evaluate the New Bibliography pursued by W. W. Greg and others in the first half of the twentieth century and at the reaction against it, for example in Wells and Taylor’s Oxford Complete Works of 1986. In addition, we will discuss two current trends in scholarship. The first of these trends is a new emphasis on attribution, where scholars claim, on the one hand, to have
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discovered the presence of other writers in canonical plays such as Henry VI Part I, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, and Macbeth and, on the other, to have discovered proof that Shakespeare wrote parts of non-canonical plays such as Edward III, Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy, and Double Falsehood. This trend is strongly in evidence in the 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan. The second trend is the emergence of a concept of Shakespeare as a ‘Literary Dramatist’ (i.e. as someone interested in promoting his own position as a poet-playwright through print). That position is most obviously tied to Lukas Erne, but others such as Patrick Cheney and Jeffrey Knapp have also made much of this idea. How does knowledge of the documents of theatre history help us to evaluate these positions? In what ways should the documents of theatre history influence editing practice today? What are the standards of ‘proof’ and ‘reasonable doubt’ in theatre history? How far and how positively has the discipline evolved since the days of Greg?
Primary Text The First Folio of Shakespeare’s Works (1623), ideally in the Norton edition edited by Hinman. Obviously you do not need to read the work in its entirety, but it would be good to look carefully at the presentation of the plays and also at the introductory material, both the introduction to Norton edition and the prefatory material to the 1623 text itself.
Secondary Reading W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy Text’, Studies in Bibliography 3 (1951-2), 19-36. Sums up the key methods of the New Bibliography. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) David Carnegie and Gary Taylor, eds, The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Lost Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) John Jowett, ‘Varieties of Collaboration in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays and Late Plays’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 106-128 Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped: 1606-1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney, eds, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Presentations: Presentation 1: Analysis of the influence of Gary Taylor and the Oxford edition of the Complete Works (1986). Sources might include Andrew Murphy, ‘The Oxford Shakespeare Re-viewed (Again)’, Text 16 (2006), 157-71, and Thomas Middleton, Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), which includes Macbeth. Presentation 2: Analysis of Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
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The Philosophical Poem: Pope, Wordsworth and Tennyson Dr Timothy Michael ([email protected])
This seminar will take it as a given that verse is not the ideal vehicle for the exposition of systematic philosophy. It will also take it as a given that our understanding of certain kinds of poems is enriched by a knowledge of the intellectual background to which they respond and, in rare cases, alter. We shall focus on three poetsPope, Wordsworth, and Tennysonand on three of the most ambitious philosophical poems in the language: An Essay on Man (1733-34), the 1805 Prelude, and In Memoriam (1850).
The aim of the seminar will be to move beyond critical platitudes about these poems’ relationship to the broader history of ideas: in Pope’s case, that he simply gave old ideasnone terribly interestingelegant new expression; in Wordsworth’s case, that he articulated a revolutionary philosophy about the union of man and nature and about the powers of the creative imagination; in Tennyson’s case, that scientific developments occasioned a re-evaluation of his metaphysics. We will focus, rather, on specific points of philosophical contact and influence as realized in the poems themselves, tracing their origins in primary works of philosophy.
Students will be expected to find out and read a substantial amount of philosophy, criticism (contemporary, classic, and current), and biographyaccording to their own interests and passionsin order to gain a fuller understanding of the relationship of these poems to their social and intellectual contexts.
Vacation Reading and Editions
Students are strongly encouraged to get as much of the primary reading done over the vacation as possible (i.e., An Essay on Man, the 1805 Prelude, and In Memoriam). Ideally, you will have read the primary works over the vacation so that you can spend the term itself pursuing philosophical and critical sources. The following editions are recommended, as they contain extensive annotation which will point you in useful directions during the term:
Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Tom Jones (Princeton, 2016) Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Abrams, Gill, and Wordsworth (Norton, 1979) Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Ricks (Routledge, 2006) OR In Memoriam, ed. Erik Gray (Norton, 2003)
General Criticism and Biography
This is not an exhaustive list of relevant criticism, but should be enough to get you started. Feel free to make a start on the asterisked items over the vacation.
*Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism (1971) Barnard, John (ed.). Pope: The Critical Heritage (1973) Dixon, P. (ed.). Writers and their Background: Alexander Pope (1972) Erskine-Hill, Howard. The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (1985) Engell, James. The Creative Imagination (1981) Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) *Gilmore, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890 (1994) Lockridge, Laurence. The Ethics of Romanticism (1989)
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Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life (1985) Martin, Robert. Tennyson (1980) Perry, Seamus. Tennyson (2004) Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson (1989) Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (1945) *Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth-Century Background (1940) *. The Seventeenth-Century Background (1934)
Course Schedule: WEEK 1: Pope: An Essay on Man I
Primary: Epistles I and II (1733)
Secondary: Damrosch, Leopold. The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (1987) Goldgar, Bertrand. ‘Pope’s Theory of the Passions: The Background of Epistle II of the Essay on Man’, Philological Quarterly 41:4 (1962): 730-43 Hammond, B.S. Pope and Bolingbroke (1984) Leranbaum, Miriam. Alexander Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum’ 1729-1744 (1977) McColley, Grant. ‘Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a Partial Source of Pope’s Essay on Man’, The Open Court 46 (1932): 581-84 Nuttall, A.D. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (1984) White, Douglas. Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in ‘An Essay on Man’ (1970)
WEEK 2: Pope: An Essay on Man II
Primary: Epistles III and IV (1733 and 1734)
Secondary: McLaverty, James. Pope, Print, and Meaning (2001) . ‘Warburton’s False Comma: Reason and Virtue in Pope’s Essay on Man’, Modern Philology 99:3 (February 2002): 379-92 Noggle, James. The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (2001) Parker, Fred. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (2003) Solomon, Harry. The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (1993) . ‘Reading Philosophical Poetry: A Hermeneutics of Metaphor for Pope’s Essay on Man’, in The Philosopher as Writer, ed. Ginsberg, pp. 122-39 (1987)
WEEK 3: Wordsworth: The Prelude I
Primary: The 1805 Prelude, Books 1-7
Secondary: Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1958) . Natural Supernaturalism (1971) Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: “The Prelude” (1991) Rader, Melvin. Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach (1967)
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WEEK 4: Wordsworth: The Prelude II
Primary: The 1805 Prelude, Books 8-13
Secondary: Engell, James. The Creative Imagination (1981), pp. 265-76 Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (2006) Michael, Timothy. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (2016), pp.1-60 Potkay, Adam. Wordsworth’s Ethics (2012)
WEEK 5: Tennyson: In Memoriam I
Primary: In Memoriam (1850): 1-67
Secondary: Culler, Dwight. The Poetry of Tennyson (1977) Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson (1989) Perry, Seamus. Tennyson (2004)
WEEK 6: Tennyson: In Memoriam II
Primary: In Memoriam (1850): 68-133
Secondary: Armstrong, Isobel. ‘The Collapse of Object and Subject: In Memoriam’. Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1982) . Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (1993) Dean, D.R., Tennyson and Geology (1985) Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) Stevenson, Lionel. Darwin Among the Poets (1932)
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Anglo-Italian Romantic Poetry Dr Anna Camilleri ([email protected]) Dr William Bowers ([email protected])
The Italian influence on English literary culture saw its fullest expression in the fifteen years following the Battle of Waterloo. In these years a pervasive Italianism characterised many facets of London life, including poetry, periodicals, translation, and even the Queen’s trial of 1820. Peace in continental Europe allowed tourists to cross the Simplon Pass to a culture they had been deprived of for twenty years. Those who stayed at home but felt ‘a languishment / For skies Italian’, had on the banks of the Thames a city fascinated with Italy. This course will be concerned with poetry of the late romantic period and particularly how ideas of Italy, and the use of Italian verse forms, were contested in English literary culture. The authors considered include Byron, Shelley, and Hunt, the radical appropriators of the ‘Italian style’, but we will study these authors beside a number of less well-known poets. In the later stages of the course we will also give due attention to sentimental and travel poetry that was the product of two conflicting traditions: the enduring appeal of the ‘satanic’ verse of the late Romantics and a burgeoning tourist industry that gave us Murray’s Hand-book, Baedeker, and Thomas Cook. Knowledge of Italian is not required for this course.
1. Romance Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini (1816). John Keats, ‘Isabella; or the Pot of Basil’ (1818). William Herbert, Pia della Pietra (1820).
2. Burlesque John Hookham Frere, Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work (1817). Lord Byron, Beppo (1817). Anon., Beppo in London: A Metropolitan Story (1819). Ugo Foscolo, 'Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians', Quarterly Review (1819).
3. Vision Henry Francis Cary, The Vision (1814). Foscolo, Two Essays on Dante, Edinburgh Review (1818). Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1822).
4. History Percy Shelley, The Cenci (1819). Felicia Hemans, ‘Night-Scene in Genoa’ (1819); ‘Properzia Rossi’ (1828). Charles Johnston, ‘Six sonnets on reading Sismondi’ (1823).
5. Travel William Wordsworth, ‘Stanzas, Composed in the Semplon Pass’ (1820); ‘At Vallombrosa’ (1842). Samuel Rogers, Italy (1822). Mary Shelley ‘The English in Italy’, Westminster Review (1826) Charlotte Bury, The three great sanctuaries of Tuscany (1831)
6. Legacy Extracts from A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent (1836) and Baedeker’s Italy (1867). Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage (1849) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows (1851)
Further reading list TBC
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Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism and the Fin de Siècle Dr Stefano Evangelista ([email protected])
Cosmopolitanism, derived from the Greek for ‘world citizenship’, denotes the aspiration to transcend national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, and to imagine oneself in relation to a global community. In this course we will explore the meaning of cosmopolitanism, its relevance for literary studies and its role in the literature of the ‘long’ fin de siècle. By focusing on a broad range of authors and genres, we will study how cosmopolitanism was theorised, debated, practised, defended and attacked in this period. Questions we will address include: how did authors understand the relationship between the local and the global? What were the literary and social politics of cosmopolitanism at the turn of the twentieth century? How did international mobility affect the perception of the world (cosmos) and individual identity? What was the role of empire in the formulation of a specifically British cosmopolitan ideal? In our study of how texts and ideas migrated across borders, we will pay attention to the specifics of the European, trans-Atlantic and global connections of English literature from this period.
Week 1. Cosmopolitanism and Modernity The first class provides an historical and theoretical introduction to the concept of cosmopolitanism and its relevance for literary studies by focusing on a number of short texts from the turn of the century and the present.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863) Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ (1997) Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’ (2005)
Week 2. Precarious Identities In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, Eliot abandoned her commitment to the depiction of English provincial life and turned instead to a larger canvas. Building on Eliot’s representation of Jewishness, this week we will focus on questions of individual identity and on the ethics and aesthetics of the novel form. Virginia Woolf provides an explicitly gendered focus on the question of cosmopolitan/national identities.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)
Week 3. Senses of Place This week focuses on the representation of place and space – how space becomes place through travel writing, imaginary geography, the gaze of the foreign observer and the urban flaneur. Material from this week can be compared to the representation of foreign space in, for instance, Italian novels and short stories by Henry James.
Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895) and Cities (1903) Vernon Lee, Genius Loci (1899) Lafcadio Hearn, ‘My first Day in the Orient’ and ‘The Chief City of the Province of the Gods’ from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1939)
Week 4. At Home in the World This week concentrates on the lure and the dangers of foreign cultures, and their representation in fiction and non-fiction from this period. What are the duties of citizenship and how do writers represent their transgressions? We will also address the complex question of the politics and ethics of nationalism.
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Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1943) Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917)
Week 5. The Stranger This week focuses on the fictional investigation of the figure of the stranger, which often has enigmatic or uncanny undertones. Simmel’s concise essay will provide a sociological counterpart to fictional explorations by Conrad, Mansfield, and the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907) Knut Hamsun, Mysteries (1892) Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (1911) Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’ (1908)
Week 6. International Styles Influenced by French and Belgian Symbolism, Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French. Decadence, Symbolism and Naturalism – the main literary movements of the fin de siècle – were by many perceived to be internationalist in style and ideas. But what is literary internationalism? Can literature, which necessarily comes to life though the medium of a national language, ever be truly international? We will try to answer these question by concentrating on British perceptions of international literary movements and avant-garde periodicals.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891) Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893) George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) The Yellow Book (1894-97) The Savoy (1896)
All the longer works of fiction are available as paperbacks or online via archive.org or similar. Please note, however, that for the purposes of class discussion it is best to acquire hard copies and bring them with you. Photocopies or scanned versions of some of the shorter texts will be provided.
Participants are not expected to be proficient in any foreign language and English translations are recommended for all foreign-language texts; but you are welcome to read them in the original if you prefer, and to draw on your foreign-language skills in your assignment. Questions of translation will also form part of our discussion, where appropriate.
The primary readings on which we will focus in class obviously only constitute a small number of possible texts relevant to this topic. Other English-language authors from this period worth exploring for their international connections and experiences include Isabella Bird, George Egerton, Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Amy Levy, George Moore, Ouida, E. Mary F. Robinson, Robert Louis Stevenson. Remember that virtually all authors we will study in class wrote for the periodical press, and many of them also doubled up as travel writers or translators, or both (e.g. Arthur Symons). Therefore periodicals (especially literary and international periodicals), travel literature and translations are also excellent primary sources.
Recommended secondary reading Adorno, Thedor W., ‘Words from Abroad’ Agathocleous, Tanya, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteen Century (2011) – contains a reading of Conrad Albrecht, Thomas, ‘”The Balance of Separateness and Communication”: Cosmopolitan Ethics in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, ELH 79 (2012)
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Anderson, Amanda, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultuvation of Detachment (2001) – contains readings of Eliot and Wilde * Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) * - ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism’, in The Ethics of Identity (2005) Apter, Emily, Against World Literature (2013) - The Translation Zone (2006) - ‘Untranslatables: A World System’, New Literary History 39:3 (2008) * Beck, Ulrich, Cosmopolitan Vision (2006) – a very useful sociological perspective Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings (1996), especially ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ and ‘The Task of the Translator’ Bernheimer, Charles (ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor), Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (2002) Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (1994) - * ‘The Vernacular Cosmopolitan’, in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, ed. by Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (2000) Boehmer, Elleke, Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2016) Boes, Tobias, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (2012) Brown, G.W. and David Held, The Cosmopolitanism Reader (2010) Brown, Julia Prewitt, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (1997) Bullock, Philip Ross, ‘Ibsen on the London Stage: Independent Theatre as Transnational Space’ Forum for Modern Language Studies (2017) – several other relevant essays in this special issue Bürger, Peter (trans. Michael Shaw), Theory of the Avant Garde (1984) * Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters (1999, 2004) Buzzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800- 1918 (1993) Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) Chapman, Alison and Jane Stabler (eds), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Artists and Writers in Italy (2003) Cohen, William A., ‘Wilde’s French’, in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. by Joseph Bristow (2013) D’haen, Theo, ‘Mapping Modernism: Gaining in Translation – Martinus Nijhoff and T.S. Eliot’, Comparative Critical Studies 6:1 (2009) - The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012) Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (2003) Eels, Emily, Proust’s Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture (2002) – stimulating on international styles Evangelista, Stefano and Richard Hibbitt, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Literary Cosmopolitanism at the Fin de Siècle’, Comparative Critical Studies 10:2 (2013) – this special issues contains several essays that should be of interest Gagnier, Regenia, Cosmopolitanism, Decadence, Globalisation (2010)
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* Gandhi, Leelah, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Aesthetic Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006) * Kant, Immanuel, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) - ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795) Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (1974) Livesey, Ruth, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (2007) Marshall, Gail, ed, The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (2007) – a useful introduction to this period with essays mapping various topics and genres Marx, Carl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) McDonagh, Josephine, ‘Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette’, Victorian Studies 55:3 (2013) Moi, Toril, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006) Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel (1998) *- ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review (2000) Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism’, Boston Review (1 October 1994) - and Joshua Coehn, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (1996) Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion (1987) Pollock S., H. K. Bhaba, et al., ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture 12:3 (2000) Potolsky, Matthew, The Decadent Republic of Letters (2012) Prendergast, Christopher (ed.), Debating World Literature (2004) Radford, Andrew and Victoria Reid, Channel Packets: Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880- 1940 Sapiro, Gisèle, ‘Authorship in Transnational Perspective: World Literature in the Making’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3UaLtiaprM - a very good introduction to the sociological approach Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (1988) - Death of a Discipline (2003) Vadillo, Ana Parejo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers to Modernity (2005) Venuti, Lawrence (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (2000) Walkowitz, Rebecca L., Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006) *- Nights out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (2012)
* starred items are particularly recommended
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Writing the City Dr Ushashi Dasgupta ([email protected])
This C-Course is about literature, geography, and modernity. London as we know it came into being during the long nineteenth century, and novelists, poets, journalists and social investigators were irresistibly drawn to this space, determined to capture the growth and dynamism of the Great Metropolis. Do we have Pierce Egan, Henry Mayhew, Arthur Conan Doyle and Alice Meynell to thank for our conception of ‘the urban’? As our classes will show, these authors created the city to a certain extent, even as they attempted to describe it and to use it as a literary setting. In order to appreciate the sheer breadth of responses London inspired, we will discuss writing from across the century, with a coda on Virginia Woolf. We will explore the role of the city in forming identities and communities, the impact of space upon psychology and behaviour, and the movements between street, home, shop and slum. Throughout, we will consider the central tension in all city writing: was the capital a place of opportunity and freedom, or was it dangerous and oppressive? The ‘character sketch’ was a major urban genre in the period, and accordingly, each of our classes will centre around a particular London type. As we move from personality to personality, we will begin to appreciate how cities fundamentally shape people – and how people leave their mark on the world around them.
Primary Reading Before you arrive in Oxford, please try to read as many of the core works listed below as you can; a number of them are lengthy, and reward close and careful reading. Those that are difficult to source in hard copy should be available online. For more canonical titles, you could try editions from the Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics series. Further extracts will be distributed once you’re here, during an introductory 0th Week meeting.
1. The Flâneur This class will consider the figure of the walker, stroller, or lounger. Pierce Egan, Life in London, or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and His Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in Their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis (1821). George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock (1859).
2. The ‘Tough Subject’ Here, we’ll discuss the nature of urban poverty. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Try the recent Oxford University Press selection. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3) and ‘Night Walks’ (1861).
3. The Sinner Stigmatised and threatening figures – the murderer, the criminal, the prostitute – will take centre stage this week. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (1874). Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890) and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). Extracts to be provided from Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (1840) and GWM Reynolds, Mysteries of London (1844).
4. The Homemaker This week’s discussion will address the relationship between the home and the city: who were the guardians of domestic space? Did they succeed in their attempts to keep the city at bay? George Gissing, The Nether World (1889) and The Paying Guest (1895). Extracts to be provided from Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s letters (to 1866) and Octavia Hill, The Homes of the London Poor (1875) and Letters to Fellow Workers (1864-1911).
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5. The Modern Woman How did women claim London as their own at the turn of the century? Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (1888). Alice Meynell, London Impressions (1898). Extracts to be provided from Levy’s A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889).
6. Coda: Virginia Woolf We end with Woolf – writer and flâneuse. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Extracts to be provided from Woolf’s non-fiction.
Secondary Criticism A week-by-week breakdown of recommended critical reading will be circulated at the start of the course. You could take a look at a few of the following suggestions before you arrive:
Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (2000). Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (2011). Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (2005). Isobel Armstrong, ‘Theories of Space and the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, 19, 17 (2003), 1-21. Rosemary Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (2012). Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015). Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds.), Restless Cities (2010). Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927-40), especially ‘The Flâneur’, ‘Baudelaire’, ‘The Interior’, ‘Arcades’ and ‘Exhibitions’. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (2011). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (2000). Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810-1840: Cockney Adventures (2012). HJ Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973-6). Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse (2016). Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (2007). Ann Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (2002). Michael Irwin, Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (1979). Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (2003). Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974). Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (eds.), The City Reader (2015). Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (2001). Lawrence Manley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London (2011). Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999). Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992). Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (1998). Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (2000). Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (1995). Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (2000). Lawrence Phillips (ed.), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (2007). John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (2003). Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1994). Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770-1900 (2004). FS Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (1979).
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Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (2016). Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903). Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth (eds.), Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (2007). Jeremy Tambling (ed.), Dickens and London (2009). William B. Thesing, The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (1982). Ana Parejo Vadillo, Woman Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (2005). Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992). Jerry Whyte, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (2008). Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973). Julian Wolfreys, Writing London (1998-2007).
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Trollope Dr Sophie Ratcliffe ([email protected])
This course will examine the writing of Trollope and other Victorian novelists, paying particular attention to the experience of reading serialised fiction, both in the nineteenth century, and now. We will explore questions of communal reading, reading in libraries and the material encounter with the serialised novel. Ideas of readerly attention in relation to long and multiplot novels and the novel as a series will form further elements of our discussion, as will the debates surrounding physiological responses to fiction. We will use the six weeks to consider ways in which nineteenth-century writers might have theorised their own reading, and to consider a variety of methodological approaches to these fictional encounters, ranging from affect theory to new formalism. Trollope will provide a unifying thread to our discussions – the ‘Others’ will include Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot. Questions of other minds, and the ethics of fiction and criticism will also be central to this course. The reading list gives details of the primary texts for each week and relevant supporting critical material. Further shorter readings will be provided on a weekly basis. The course will also involve a visit to the Bodleian to look at works by Trollope and Dickens in serial form.
I. Getting ‘Things’ Out of the Library Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, ed. Helen Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011)
Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Rachel Sagner Buurma, ‘Publishing the Victorian Novel’. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky, 87—107
II. Community: Reading With and of Others Trollope, The Way We Live Now, ed. Frances O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Andrew H. Miller, ‘Lives Unled in Realist Fiction’, Representations 98.1 (Spring 2007) and Burdens of Perfection (Ithaca: Cornell, 2008) Adela Pinch, Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth Century British Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).
III. Memory and Attention Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: OUP, 2016) Thackeray, Pendennis (any edition, there’s no decent recent one)
Alex Woloch, The One and the Many (Princeton: 2004) Emily Steinlight, ‘Dickens’s Supernumeraries and the Biopolitical Imagination’, The Novel (2010) Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction. Caroline Levine, Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth Century British Novel
IV. Forms: Reading Now Trollope, An Editor’s Tales (any edition, Penguin is good, or John Sutherland’s Later Short Stories) Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (OUP or Penguin)
Galen Strawson, ‘Against Narrativity’, http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf
V. Bodies: Physiology, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (OUP, 2008) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford or Penguin)
Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2007)
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VI. Illustration Adaptation Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (or indeed any Victorian novel with illustrations that interests you) Simon Grennan, Dispossession: A Novel of Few Words, After John Caldigate (Cape, 2014)
Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. John Glavin, Reading After Dickens Simon Jarvis, Death and Mr Pickwick
Note This a novel-heavy course (nine on this list). I’ve included the criticism in case you wish to get a sense of it in advance but the main thing to do is to read the novels. I will offer more specific page- range readings within these when the course begins. If you can read (or have read) all the novels on this list – great. If not, aim to read at least five or six (Pendennis is particularly marvellous, I think), and to have had a browse through the others. Please feel free to contact me with queries on [email protected]
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Late Modernist Poetry in Britain and America Dr Michael Whitworth ([email protected])
The history of modernist poetry does not end in 1939, or in 1945. As modernism in the tradition of Yeats and Eliot was institutionalized by the New Criticism, poetry in the tradition of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams took a distinctive trajectory. This C course will consider poems and prose statements by American poets (primarily those of the ‘Black Mountain School’ – Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn), and by a later generation of British poets who drew upon their work (primarily those associated with the ‘Cambridge School’ -- J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, and Douglas Oliver). It will consider ideas of modernity and of poetic form, the idea and practice of lyric, phenomenology, geography, gender, and science.
PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE: 1. Charles Olson (and the idea of Late Modernism). 2. Andrew Crozier (and Phenomenology). 3. Geographies. 4. Gender. 5. Edward Dorn. 6. J. H. Prynne (and Science).
PRIMARY READING: POETRY Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry (1960). Concentrate on the poems and prose statements by Charles Olson (especially ‘The Kingfishers’), Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Edward Dorn; it would also be valuable to look at the selection of Frank O’Hara’s poems. Crozier, Andrew. An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton (2012). ---, and Tim Longville, eds. A Various Art (1987). Out of print, but obtainable cheaply second-hand. Concentrate on the poems by J.H.Prynne, Douglas Oliver, and Andrew Crozier. Dorn, Edward. ‘Idaho Out’ (Geography [1965]), ‘The North Atlantic Turbine’ [i.e., ‘Thesis’, ‘The First Note’, ‘England’, and ‘A Theory of Truth’ (The North Atlantic Turbine [1967]); reprinted in The Collected Poems (1983). Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (1983). We won’t be studying the Maximus Poems in full, but you should acquaint yourself with more than the selection in Allen’s anthology. Prynne, J. H. Poems (2nd edn 1999, 3nd edn. 2005, or 4th edn. 2015). We will concentrate on the volumes from 1968-1974, i.e. Kitchen Poems, The White Stones, Brass, and Wound Response (1974). Tarlo, Harriet, ed. The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Exeter: Shearsman, 2011)
PRIMARY READING: PROSE Allen, Donald, and Warren Tallman, eds. Poetics of the New American Poetry (New York: Grove, 1973). If obtainable, a valuable collection. Creeley, Robert. Collected Essays (1989). Especially ‘Introduction to New Writing in the USA’ (1967) and ‘Introduction to Penguin Selected Whitman’ (1973). Crozier, Andrew. An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton (2012). Duncan, Robert. A Selected Prose (1995). Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World (1973). Olson, Charles. Human Universe (1960), or Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (1997). Prioritise ‘Projective Verse’ (which is also in The New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen), and ‘Human Universe’.
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SECONDARY READING Altieri, Charles. ‘Olson's Poetics and the Tradition.’ boundary 2, 2, No. 1/2, (Charles Olson: Essays, Reminiscences, Reviews) (Autumn, 1973-Winter, 1974), 173-188. [JSTOR] Burt, Stephen, and Jennifer Lewin. ‘Poetry and the New Criticism.’ A Companion to Twentieth- Century Poetry, ed. Neil Roberts (2001). Crozier, Andrew. ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism.’ Society and Literature, 1945-1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983). Culler, Jonathan. ‘Apostrophe.’ Diacritics, 7 no.4 (1977), 59-69. [JSTOR] Davidson, Ian. Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2007), esp. chapter 3. Kern, Robert. ‘Composition as Recognition: Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics.’ boundary 2, 6, no. 3 (Robert Creeley: A Gathering) (1978), 211-32. [JSTOR] Osborne, John. ‘Black Mountain and Projective Verse.’ A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, ed. Neil Roberts (2001). Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?’ New Literary History, 13, no. 3 (1982), 485-514. [Doesn’t directly discuss the poets on this course, but important re: the Pound/Williams tradition.] [JSTOR] Reeve, N.H., and Richard Kerridge. Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (1995). Whitworth, Michael H., ed. Modernism (2006).
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Fiction in Britain since 1945 – History, Time and Memory Dr Marina Mackay ([email protected]) Dr Adam Guy ([email protected]) Professor Laura Marcus ([email protected])
(Thursdays 2pm – 4pm -Weeks 1-6) In this course, we will trace aspects of the novel in Britain from the immediate post-WW2 period through to the present day, with a particular focus on representations of history, time and memory, and on the ways in which these have shaped narrative forms and voices in the fictions of the period. It is strongly recommended that students taking the course read as many of the primary texts, and as widely in the secondary reading, as possible over the summer.
Week 1: Historical Rupture and the Distortions of Memory
Primary reading: Henry Green, Back (1946) Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Recommended secondary reading: Tammy Clewell, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 93-128 (‘Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited’). Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green (1982; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), pp. 157-80 (‘The Prosthetic Art’). Gill Plain, Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and Peace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013), pp. 1- 38.
Week 2: Contingency and Futurity
Primary reading: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954) and ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Driver’s Seat (1970)
Recommended secondary reading: Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 11-76 (‘Chronoschisms’). Patricia Waugh, ‘Muriel Spark and the Metaphysics of Modernity’, in David Herman, ed., Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).
Week 3: Emigration and Global History
Primary Reading Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin, 2006 [1956]). Denis Williams, The Third Temptation (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2010 [1968]). [Easiest to order direct from the publisher (www.peepaltreepress.com); second-hand copies available from Amazon or Abebooks.]
Secondary Reading Edouard Glissant, ‘The Novel of the Americas’ in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 144–50. Una Marson, ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’ (1949) in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welch (eds), The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 185–6.
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Sam Selvon, ‘A Note on Dialect’ (1971) repr. in Susheila Nasta, Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1988), p. 63. The Stuart Hall Project: Revolution, Politics, Culture and the New Left Experience, dir. John Akomfrah (BFI, 2013).
Week 4: Fictions of Exhaustion
Primary Reading Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976 (London: Faber, 2010). Christine Brooke-Rose, Out (1964), available in The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006).
Secondary Reading Philip Glass, String Quartet No. 2 (‘Company’ – after Beckett). [various recordings available on YouTube] Sianne Ngai, ‘Merely Interesting’ in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 110–73. [please also familiarize yourself with the work of the visual artists discussed in this chapter] Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘From Realism to Reality’, trans. Barbara Wright, London Magazine, May 1965, pp. 31–8. [available via SOLO]
Week 5: The Telling of Tales
Primary Reading W.G.Sebald, Austerlitz (2001) Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)
Secondary Reading/Viewing Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899) and Chapter 4 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901); ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ (1914). Gillian Rose – ‘Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation’, in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Susan Sontag, ‘A Mind in Mourning’, in Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) [available on YouTube] Grant Gee (dir.) Patience (after Sebald) (2012)
Week 6: Beginning again and again…
Primary Reading Ali Smith, The Accidental (2005) Tom McCarthy Remainder (2006)
Secondary Reading/Viewing Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [sometimes translated as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’], 1936. Zadie Smith, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, New York Review of Books 55 (18), 20 November: pp. 89- 95. Charlie Kaufman (dir.), Synecdoche, New York (2008)
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FURTHER READING. General Background Reading for course:
Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds.), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume Seven: British and Irish Fiction since 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950-1995 (London: Routledge: 1996) Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988) Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Hodder, 1995) Rachel Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (eds), End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). David James (ed.) The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Richard Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) Zachary Leader (ed), On Modern British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002) Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds), Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (Longmans, 1999) Rod Mengham (ed.), An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 1999) Bran Nichol (ed.), Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2002) Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960-2000. The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2005)
Background reading for Week 1
Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003). Thomas S Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2016). Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 2009). Marius Hentea, Henry Green and the Limits of Modernism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2014).
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Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve, The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Marina MacKay Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Kristine Miller, British Literature of the Blitz (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 83-115 (‘Real Men in Henry Green’s War Writing’). Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). Nick Shepley, Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). Victoria Stewart, Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). D.J. Taylor, After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Background Reading for Week 2
Aidan Day, ‘Parodying Postmodernism’, English, 56 (2007): 321-337. James Bailey, ‘Salutary Scars: The “Disorienting’ Fictions of Muriel Spark’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 9 (2015): 34-52. Malcolm Bradbury, The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977). (Important period piece on the perceived dominance of metafiction.) Nick Bentley, Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Oxford: Lang, 2007). A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, revised edition (London: Vintage, 1994). Alice Ferrebe, Literature of the 1950s: Good Brave Causes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012). Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). David Herman, ed., Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010). David Herman, ed., Modern Fiction Studies, 47, 3 (2001). [Special Issue on Iris Murdoch] Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007). Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987). Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rowe, Anne, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).
Background Reading for Week 3
J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). –––– Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Mary Lou Emery, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity, 13 (2006): 425–43. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Wilson Harris, Tradition the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Press, 1967). C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013 [1963]). Journal of West Indian Literature, 20.2 (2012) [special issue on Selvon]. Malachi McIntosh, Emigration and Caribbean Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996). Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary & Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1992). Charlotte Williams and Evelyn A. Williams (eds), Denis Williams: A Life in Works – New and Collected Essays (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010).
Background Reading for Week 4
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ [1961], trans. Michael T. Jones, New German Critique, 26 (1982): 119-150. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (1951/55), Malone Dies (1951/56), The Unnamable (1953/58). Sarah Birch, Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). George Craig, et al (eds), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vols 2/3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011/14). Sara Crangle, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 24.3 (1995): 3–28. Ellen J. Friedman and Richard Martin (eds), Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke- Rose (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Julia Jordan, Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch (London: Continuum, 2010). James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Karen R. Lawrence,, Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010) . Jean-Michel Rabaté, Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1965). Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion, trans. Maria Jolas (London: Calder, 1963). Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
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Background Reading for Week 5 Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) David James, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception (London: Continuum, 2008) J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, W.G.Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Ann Scott – Real Events Revisited: Fantasy, Memory and Psychoanalysis (London: Virago, 1996) Marianna Torgovnik, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). [Includes chapters on Ishiguro and Sebald] Michael Wood – ‘The Discourse of Others’ [Ishiguro] in Children of Silence: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (1998) Background Reading for Week 6 Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (Continuum, 2009) Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) [Contains chapter on Ali Smith’s The Accidental] Dennis Duncan (ed.), Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (Canterbury, Gylphi, 2016) Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays, New York Review of Books [publications], 2017.
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Post-Colonial Literary Cities Dr Dominic Davies ([email protected])
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, intensifying processes of globalisation have resulted in the replacement of the nation-state with the rise of what Saskia Sassen calls the ‘the global city’ as a central node in planetary social, cultural and economic interactions. Meanwhile, once peripheral populations are increasingly drawn into a patchwork of unevenly developed urban relations, as the world becomes evermore subject to what Henri Lefebvre once labelled ‘the urban revolution’. Postcolonial urban citizens inhabit and are increasingly connected to a global urban fabric predicated on the proximity of differing social groups and economic inequality which also, and correspondingly, give rise to new kinds of cultural interactions and social divisions. This course explores how literary and cultural production responds to these new hyper-urban cityscapes, asking how recent formal innovations and trends have been shaped by the segregated spaces and unevenly developed infrastructures of cities such as post-apartheid Johannesburg, neocolonial Delhi, or post-9/11 London. However, it also follows postcolonial criticism’s commitment to the exploration of ways in which literary writings might address, reshape and reimagine alternative urban futures. If the contemporary city is increasingly marked by ongoing colonialisms—or what Andy Merrifield describes as a proliferating ‘spatial apartheid’, especially (but by no means only) in the Global South—this course is specifically concerned to ask if new literary forms, from literary non-fiction to graphic narrative, can be read as a concerted cultural effort to represent, diagnose and circumvent the different kinds of violence embedded in these new infrastructural formations. Each week will focus on two or three primary texts organised geographically, thematically or formally, and combine these with related critical readings to explore the continuing pertinence of postcolonial analysis to urban literature and culture in the twenty-first century.
Course Outline
Week 1: The Right to the (Postcolonial) City Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys (2006) Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower (2011) Teju Cole, Open City (2011)
Harvey, David, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2013) King, Anthony D., Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban (2016) Merrifield, Andy, The New Urban Question (2014) Mitchell, Don, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003)
Week 2: Postcolonial London and the Immigrant Flâneur Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003) Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2008) Brian Chikwava, Harare North (2009)
Graham, Stephen, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (2011) Jacobs, Jane M., Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996) McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004) Theime, John, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place (2016)
Week 3: Urban America David Simon, The Wire, Season 1 (2002) Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), Between the World and Me (2015)
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Kennedy, Liam, Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture (2000) Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010) Soja, Edward, Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
Week 4: Literary Non-Fiction Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) Rana Dasgupta, Capital, A Portrait of Twenty-first Century Delhi (2014) Mark Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2015)
Bremner, Lindsey, Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg, 1998-2008 (2010) Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums (2007) Ghertner, Asha, Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (2015) Nuttall, Sarah and Mbembe, Achille eds, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008)
Week 5: Urban Palestine Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008), Occupation Diaries (2012) Selma Dabbagh, Out of It (2011)
Calame, Jon, and Charlesworth, Esther, Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia (2012) Segal, Rafi, Tartakover, David, and Weizman, Eyal ed. A Civillian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (2003) Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation ()
Week 6: Graphic Cities Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Delhi Calm (2010) Amir and Khalil, Zahra’s Paradise (2011) André Diniz and Mauricio Hora, Picture a Favela (2012)
Ahrens, Jörn, and Meteling, Arno, Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence (2010) Graham, Stephen, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (2016) McGuirk, Justin, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (2014) Mehta, Benita, and Mukherjee, Pia eds. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (2015)
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Prison Writing and the Literary World Dr Michelle Kelly ([email protected])
The scale of mass incarcerations that characterized the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the willingness of states to imprison political opponents, and the new prominence within the literary field of forms of testimony and life writing, have together produced a body of writing that is both highly attentive to the experience of incarceration and to its power as a form of political writing. At the same time, the prisoner of conscience, especially the imprisoned writer, acquired increasing moral authority in the global public sphere, becoming a foundational figure within human rights discourse, while literacy, writing, and cultural programmes have become part of the prison’s rehabilitative function in some parts of the world. This course will focus on writing representing or produced under conditions of incarceration in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Incorporating writing from locations like newly independent African states, the US, the UK, Ireland, and South Africa, the course aims to map prison writing as a distinctive form, shaped both materially and formally by the conditions in which it was created, but nonetheless integral to broader patterns of literary and cultural production in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The selection of texts ranges across key historical moments (the Cold War, decolonization, the war on terror), and a wide range of locations, both core and peripheral, and enjoy varying degrees of global circulation. In this way, the course aims to interrogate the extent to which prison writing is a genre of world literature, and to consider its potential to reconfigure the coordinates of the literary world. As the course progresses, we will test the appropriateness of particular critical and theoretical frameworks to this distinctive form of writing. How does prison writing fit within the field of postcolonial literature, or the various paradigms of world literature? To what extent might it challenge some of these models? What do examples of prison writing tell us about the relationship between the writer and the state? Is prison writing a form of resistance literature, as Barbara Harlow describes it, or is it more appropriately considered within the sphere of the biopolitical? Drawing on legal and archival materials we will consider the circulation of prison writing within the literary field, and in the case of texts by imprisoned writers, their relationship to the writers’ reputation and oeuvre. The discussion will critically consider the circulation and prominence achieved by some of these texts, reading them in relation to forms like autobiography and confession, as well as legal testimony. But it will also take seriously the privileged position granted to writing and reading within this body of work.
Please read as many of the primary texts as possible before the start of term. Seminar preparation will also involve theoretical and critical readings which will be circulated.
Week 1 Fictions of Incarceration Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Steve McQueen (Dir), Hunger (Screening will be arranged at the start of term)
Week 2 The Writer and the Postcolonial State Wole Soyinka, And the Man Died Nawal el Saadawi, Memoir from the Women’s Prison Ngugi wa Thiongo, Detained
Week 3 Revolutionary Diaries Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
Week 4 Apartheid South Africa Ruth First, 117 Days
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Breytenbach, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist Athol Fugard, The Island
Week 5 War on Terror Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary See also: http://guantanamodiary.com/ Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom
Week 6 Prison Writing and Institutions Jonny Steinberg, The Number Paula Meehan, Cell Peter Benenson, ed. Amnesty 1961 The PEN Handbook for Writers in Prison
Suggestions for further reading: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 1998. ---. States of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ---. Remnants Of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 1999. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Judith Butler, Frames of War. Guillaume Cingal, “‘In an Attempt to Erase’: Breyten Breytenbach’s Prison Writing and the Need to Re-Cover.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1 (2002): 69-78. Carrol Clarkson, Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. J. M. Coetzee. 'Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State' in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Edited by David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 361-368. Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Maud Ellman, Hunger Artists Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. ----. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-76. Trans. David Macey. London: Penguin, 2004. (especially final section) Shane Graham, “Apartheid Prison Narratives, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Construction of National (Traumatic) Memory.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration ed. Graeme Harper. Continuum, 2001. Paul Gready, Writing as Resistance : Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile, and Homecoming from Apartheid South Africa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. ----. “Autobiography and the ‘Power of Writing’: Political Prison Writing in the Apartheid Era.” Journal of Southern African Studies 19.3 (1993): 489-523. Graeme Harper, “Criminal Minds and Felonious Nations; Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration ed. Graeme Harper. London: Continuum, 2001. Graeme Harper, ed. Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration. London: Continuum, 2001. J. U. Jacobs, “Confession, Interrogation, and Self-Interrogation in the New South African Prison Writing.” Kunapipi 13.1-2 (1991): 115-27. Neelika Jayawardene, ‘Leak, Memory.’ The New Inquiry Rosemary Jolly, Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996.
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Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman, eds, Inside This Place, Not Of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2011. Melissa McCarthy, ed. Incarceration and Human Rights Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Davu Seru, ‘A Manifesto on African American Prison Literature.’ American Book Review 36.3 (2015):6. David Shalkwyk, “The Rules of Physiognomy: Reading the Convict in South African Prison writing.” Pretexts: studies in Writing and Culture 7.1 (1998): 81-96. ----. “Confessions and Solidarity in the Prison Writing of Breyten Breytenbach and Jeremy Cronin.” Research in African Literatures 25.1 (1994): 23-45. Jonny Steinberg, “A Prisoner’s Wager.” In At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2007, pp211-224. Loic Wacquant. ‘The Use and Abuse of Prison in the Age of Social Insecurity.’ In McCarthy, ed. Incarceration and Human Rights Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 71-90.
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The Black Atlantic in the 1980s Professor Lloyd Pratt ([email protected])
The 1980s marked the advent of a new Black Atlantic age. The Black Atlantic had developed over the previous two centuries as a consequence of international trade in bodies and goods, resistance to such trade, international abolition and anti-racist movements, and the quest for a coherent Black culture. The 1980s saw the birth of an Anglophone Black Atlantic culture that was fed by these forces but refashioned cultures of blackness along the Atlantic rim. Through a focus on three key Black Atlantic cultural forms—the autobiography, visual portraiture, and Soul/Post-Soul aesthetics—we will consider the effects of this new Black Atlantic then and now.
You will present in groups of two or three on one week’s readings; you will also submit a seminar paper according to the guidelines in the handbook. We will meet for two half-hour individual sessions to discuss your paper, once at the start of the term and once near the end of it.
Reading List Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters Berry, James, ed. News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of West Indian-British Poetry Gilroy, Paul. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation ----. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Selected Poems Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John Neal, Mark Anthony. Soul Babies Okri, Ben. Incidents at the Shrine Phillips, Caryl. The Final Passage Warren, Kenneth. What Was African American Literature? Wideman, John Edgar. The Homewood Books
Week 1 Gilroy, Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and The Black Atlantic Neal, Soul Babies Warren, What Was African American Literature?
Week 2 Berry, ed., News for Babylon Johnson, Selected Poems
Week 3 Okri, Incidents
Week 4 Kincaid, Annie John
Week 5 Bambara, Salt-Eaters
Week 6 Wideman, Homewood Books
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C-Course Descriptions: Hilary Term
You may select any C-Course
‘Seeking into Beholding’: Ways of Reading Julian of Norwich Professor Vincent Gillespie ([email protected])
The showings of Julian of Norwich, received over several days in May 1373, are the high watermark of English vernacular theology in the Middle Ages. They are also the first great masterpiece of Middle English religious prose. Complex, subtle, nuanced and challenging, her life’s work seeks to understand the things she was shown, and to develop a way of looking at them, living with them, and writing about them. The course will seek to provide you with critical and anaytical ways of approaching these remarkable materials, and will try and encourage the deepest possible engagement with and understanding of her textual and extratextual strategies. She says that her book is ‘begun but not yet performed’. Understanding why requires a surrender to and enjoyment of one of the most sophisticated and ambitious textual edifices of all medieval literature.
I’m happy to answer any questions from potential students: please use the e-mail above.
Julian of Norwich A Basic Bibliography and Orientation Guide
General Books on the Middle English Mystics:
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge, 2011) Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics (London, 1981). Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London, 1993)
For an overview of the theological background, see any of the following: Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350, The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, 3 (New York, 1998). Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350-1550, The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, 5 (New York, 2012). Christian Spirituality II: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed J. Raitt (London 1987) A History of Christian Spirituality, Vol. II: The Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, eds. J. Leclercq, F. Vandenbroucke & L. Bouyer (London, 1968).
On Mystical Language: Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago, 2003). Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1992) Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (Oxford, 1992) Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994) On What Cannot be Said, ed. William Franke (Notre Dame, 2007) [interesting selection of medieval and post-medieval texts on apophasis]
Some Contextual Studies: Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984). Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century Saints and their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984).
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Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988). Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989). Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven & London, 1992). Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991). Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London, 1993). Women and Literature in Britain, 1150 - 1500, ed. Carol Meale, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 17 (Cambridge, 1993). Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), 822-64. Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2003) Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2007) Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, 2010) Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 2011)
Julian of Norwich
Editions: The work exists in a Short Text and a Long Text: Colledge & Walsh's edition of the Short Text (which exists in a single medieval manuscript) is fine. The Long text is preserved in two versions: the ‘Paris’ version (edited by Colledge & Walsh) and the ‘Sloane’ version (edited by Glasscoe). Opinions differ about their relative authority. There are no medieval manuscripts of either version of the Long ext. The surviving copies of the Long Text date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
You will need to have read both the Short and Long Texts.
A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge & James Walsh, Studies & Texts, 35 (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978). [mainly based on Paris MS]
Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1976, revised reprint 1993). [a ‘clean’ edition of the Sloane MS]
The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton (TEAMS, 1994)
The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise Baker (Norton Critical Editions, 2004)
The critical edition by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins: The Writings of Julian of Norwich (Pennsylvania UP, 2005) is a mixed bag: consult this if you can, but you may feel that you want to own your own copy, in which case Glasscoe or Crampton will both serve you well, though neither contains the Short Text. Watson and Jenkins include good notes, and usefully print the post-medieval versions of Julian as well. But their version of the Long Text is slightly modernized, privileges readings from Paris, and conflates from both strands. So be sure to check other editions when particular readings are important to your argument.
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Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Barry Windeatt (Oxford, 2016). This is an important addition to Julian scholarship. He bases his text on Sloane with readings from Paris (most editors do it the other way round).
There is also a late fifteenth-century epitome of the Long Text, known as the ‘Westminster’ text, ed. Hugh Kempster, Mystics Quarterly, 23:4 (1997), included also in Watson and Jenkins.
Translations: Julian of Norwich, Showings, tr. Edmund Colledge & James Walsh, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, 1978). Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love: Short Text and Long Text, tr. Elizabeth Spearing with an Introduction & Notes by A. C. Spearing, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1998). Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 2015).
Core Discussions of the Textual Tradition: Marion Glasscoe, 'Visions and Revisions: A Further Look at the Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich'. Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), pp. 103 - 120. Nicholas Watson, 'The Composition of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love', Speculum, 68 (1993), pp. 637 - 683.
Key Books on (or with substantial discussion of) Julian of Norwich: Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (London, 1987). Joan Nuth, Wisdom's Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York, 1991). Frances Beer, Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1992). Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich's Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994). David Aers & Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA, 1996). Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York & London, 1998). Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999). F. C. Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame 1999). Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2004). A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2008): good conspectus of recent views and approaches. Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich: Theologian (Yale, 2011)
Key Articles on Julian of Norwich: See the volumes of The Medieval Mystical Tradition (most recent in 2013), and the occasional essays in Mystics Quartery, now renamed the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.
Older articles, easily overlooked: Barry Windeatt, 'Julian of Norwich and Her Audience', Review of English Studies, 28 (1977), pp. 1 - 17. Barry Windeatt, 'The Art of Mystical Loving: Julian of Norwich', in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, I, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1980). Vincent Gillespie & Maggie Ross, 'The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich', in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1992). Nicholas Watson, 'The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love', in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1992). Felicity Riddy, 'Women Talking About the Things of God: A Late Medieval Subculture', in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150 - 1500, ed. Carol Meale, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 17 (Cambridge, 1993).
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The Pearl Poet Dr Helen Barr ([email protected])
This course will explore a range of critical approaches to the four poems contained in British Library Cotton Nero A.x: Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The topics we will discuss will include time and space, gender and sexuality, aesthetics, social environment, and theology.
Preliminary reading: Poems of the Pearl Manuscript ed. M.Anderson and R.A.Waldron (Exeter UP, 1987)
Anderson, J. J. Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems (2005) R.J.Blanch, M.Y. Miller and J.N.Wasserman, eds., Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives on the Pearl-Poet (1991) R.J. Blanch and Julian N Wasserman, From Pearl and to Gawain: Form to fynisment (1995) Bowers, John M., R. Barton Palmer, and Tison Pugh, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (2012). Brewer, Derek, and Jonathan Gibson. A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (1997)
Putter, Ad. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (1995) ---. An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (1996) A.C.Spearing, The Gawain-Poet (1970) Stanbury, Sarah. Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (1991)
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Old Norse Dr Sian Gronlie ([email protected])
This course is designed to be flexible enough to meet two needs. On the one hand, beginners in Old Norse will be introduced to a varied range of Old Norse Icelandic prose and poetry, and be able to set these texts in their historical and cultural contexts. On the other, those who have already studied some Old Norse will be able to focus on texts directly relevant or complementary to their own interests and expertise.
There will be language classes in Old Norse, and a series of introductory classes on the literature, in Michaelmas Term. These classes are mandatory for anyone who wishes to do the option in Hilary Term but has not done any Old Norse at undergraduate level.
Preliminary Reading List Language: E.V.Gordon, Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) Michael Barnes, A New Introduction to Old Norse, Part I Grammar (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1999)
Old Norse-Icelandic literature: Heather O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004) 162 Preben Meulengracht Sorensen, Saga and Society, transl. John Tucker (Odense: Odense University Press, 1993) G. Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) Margaret Clunies Ross, ed., Old Icelandic Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Phillip Pulsiano, ed., Medieval Scandinavia: an encyclopaedia (New York; London: Garland: 1993) Jenny Jochens, Old Norse Images of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and peacemaking: feud, law and society in saga Iceland (London; Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1990)
Translations: The Sagas of the Icelanders: a selection, ed., Viðar Hreinsson (London: Penguin, 2000) The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, ed.Viðar Hreinsson (five volumes, various translators) (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997) (now being published separately as Penguin Classics, various translators) Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987) The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), or trans. Andy Orchard as The Elder Edda (Penguin Classics, 2011)
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The Supernatural in Early Modern Literature Professor Diane Purkiss ([email protected])
While the literature of science has received a good deal of serious attention of late, the equally great preoccupation with the supernatural – where that is defined as the unnatural not contained by organised religion – has yet to break out of the somewhat straitjacketing terms of new historicism, which often offers narrow accounts of the complex textual phenomena on offer. In this course, we will examine materials in prose, poetry and drama to try to think through what happens with the early moderns and the supernatural, how topics and entities are defined, redefined and contested, and how the study of individual entities brings to the fore questions of social class, religious denomination, antipopery and antipapal anxiety, tensions between the England heartlands and the Celtic fringes, auctoritas, and empiricism. We will also scrutinise new critical categories such as disknowledge in order to arrive at ways of describing the problematics of what we observe. Seminars will focus on the following 1. Magicians, frauds, papists 2. Antiquarians 3. Purgatory and the lonely dead 4. Fairies 5. Witches 6. Alchemists
Set texts 1. Week 1. Magicians and jugglers. Samuel Harsnett, Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Maiesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out deuils. (James Roberts, Barbican, 1603. (and we might also glance at A Discovery of the Fraudulent practises of Iohn Darrel, Bacheler of Artes, in his proceedings concerning the Pretended Possession and dispossession of William Somers at Nottingham; of Thomas Darling, the boy of Burton at Caldwell; and of Katherine Wright at Mansfield, & Whittlington; and of his dealings with one Mary Couper at Nottingham, detecting in some sort the deceitfull trade in these latter dayes of casting out Deuils, London, John Wolfe, 1599) Reginald Scot, Discoverie of witchcraft, 1582 (and we might also glance at the very different 1665 edition); Spenser, Faerie Queene Book I, Hamilton’s edition, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Stephen Orgel’s one-volume Oxford edition.
Secondary Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd hat, and a multitext blog on antipopery in drama and pamphlets to which each seminar participant contributes one item
2. Week 2 Antiquarians John Aubrey, Remains of Gentilisme and Judaism and Miscellanies; Thomas Browne, Religio Medici; William Camden - Britannia - on the Irish; Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus
Secondary Piggott, Stuart. Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination, 1989 Merrifield, Ralph. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: Batsford, 1987. Print. Hutton, Ronald. Pagan Britain, 2014. Strongly debunking.
There are many still valuable older books – try those by Woodbridge, Kendrick and Iverson.
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3. Week 3 Purgatory and ghosts Primary reading: Macbeth, Hamlet and Antonio’s Revenge Bernard, G. W. The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability Before the Break with Rome, 2013 Burgess, Clive. 'A fond thing vainly invented' : an essay on Purgatory and pious motive in later medieval England’, in Parish, church and people: local studies in ay religion 1350-1750, ed. S. J. Wright, 1988, 56-84 Caciola, Nancy. Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Print. 2016.
Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.
Joynes, Andrew. Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels, and Prodigies. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001. Print.
Duffy, Eamon. Saints, sacrilege and sedition: religion and conflict in the Tudor Reformations, 2013 Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, Yale UP, second edition (with a new preface). Gordon, Andrew (ed.). The Arts of remembrance in early modern England: memorial cultures of the post-Reformation, Ashgate, 2013. Marshall, Peter. ‘Fear, purgatory and polemic in Reformation England’ in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, MUP, 1997. Mullaney, Steven. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. Chicago, 2016.
Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and identity in English Renaissance Tragedy, OUP 1999.
Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
Schreyer, Kurt A. Shakespeare’s medieval craft: remnants of the mysteries on the London stage, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
Whiting, Robert. ‘Abominable Idols: Images and Image-Breaking under Henry VIII’ Vol Journal of ecclesiastical history 1982. Whiting, Robert. “For the health of my soul": prayers for the dead in the Tudor south-west”, Southern History 5 (1983) 68-94
4. Fairies: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Daemonologie, Scottish ballads and Herrick, Spenser, Marvell, Corbet, with a look at witches’ familiars as possible hobs. Primary texts or links will be posted on the blogsite. Briggs, Katharine M. A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures. London: Penguin, 1977. Print.
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Buccola, Regina. Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2006. Print. Guyénot, Laurent. La Mort Féerique Anthropologie Du Merveilleux: XIIe-XVe Siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Print. Henderson, Lizanne, and Edward J. Cowan. Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Edinburgh, Scotland: John Donald, 2007. Lecouteux, Claude. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011. Lecouteux, Claude. The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices. Lecouteux, Claude. Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003. Normand, Lawrence, and Gareth Roberts. Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's Demonology and the North Berwick Witches. Exeter: U of Exeter, 2000. Purkiss, Diane. Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. London: Allen Lane, 2000. Print. Pócs, Éva. Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age. Budapest: Central European UP, 1999. Print. Saunders, Corinne J. Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Print. Wilby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2005. Wilby, Emma. Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism & Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Scotland. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2009. Print. 5. Witches. Sophonisba, The Witch of Edmonton, Herrick and Milton
6. Alchemy as distinct from alchemists as comedic figures For these last two classes, there will be presentations on the secondary material, which will be adversarial; for witchcraft, one pair will try to defend the Thomas-Macfarlane witchcraft thesis against a direct assault by supporters of Purkiss, Ginzburg and Rowlands On alchemy, a pair will try to defend Frances Yates’s notion of a hermetic tradion against assaults by supporters of Eggert and Ziolkowski. Reference bibliographies will be posted on the blog by the beginning of September.
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The Lettered World Dr Kathryn Murphy ([email protected])
‘Literature’ means, literally, ‘use of letters’, or ‘things made of letters’. Yet the process of acquiring literacy, and our habits of reading, tend to make us think of letters as transparent: an arbitrary vehicle for the words, sounds, and meanings they convey. Throughout the history of literature, however, the opacity of letters, their symbolic meaning, their materiality and aesthetic form, have been the subject of play, mystery, and creativity. This is especially the case in the centuries after the European invention of print, when the possibilities of mass production of the written word, the separation of letters from a writing hand, and the existence of the written letter as material object in printers’ type, offered new ways of thinking about, and with, letters. Other ways of making letters in the period of course persisted – letters were drawn, painted, inscribed, etched, carved, tattooed, graffitied, sewn, stitched, scratched, baked, and sculpted, in two and three dimensions. Being branded with the letter ‘S’ was a form of punishment for sedition. Professional writing-masters and scribes plied and taught their trades. The period also sees an increased interest in the variety of scripts, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and runes; the invention of many codes and forms of shorthand; and schemes for a universal or ‘real’ character which would be communicative across languages. Lucretius’s Latin epic poem on the nature of the universe De rerum natura, rediscovered in the Renaissance and enjoying a vogue in seventeenth-century England, used the analogy of letters to explain the idea of atoms: the natural philosophy and science of the period could be strangely literal, too. This course considers six aspects of the materiality and visual aspects of letters and the alphabet in the period roughly 1500-1700, raising questions about literacy and orality; the boundaries of the visual and the verbal; text as aesthetic object; the signifying properties of form; arbitrariness, contingency, and aleatorics; the representation of voice; and the meaning of ‘literature’ and ‘writing’ itself. We will think about the influence on canonical writing, especially poetry, of the materiality of letters; about theoretical approaches to writing and the boundaries of the ‘literary’. This course complements, but will not overlap with, B-course work on bibliography and material texts. Students will be expected to identify their own topic for their essay for this paper, with guidance from the tutor. This could take the form of a study of a writer’s, or some writers’, use of the visual form of letters in their work, or of the incorporation of text in visual media; a thematic study related to one of the weekly topics; or a critical or theoretical reflection on the issues this material raises. Essays on work in media other than print will be welcomed (with guidance), as will essays which are theoretical in their preoccupations. Though some of the material we will look at is not, or was not originally, in English – and indeed some of it is in scripts that are not legible – no knowledge of other languages will be required. The course will be taught over six weeks. Each student will be expected to deliver a presentation in one of the weeks of the course. Some classes will take place in the Bodleian, to examine particular print and manuscript examples; and in week 4, the class will involve a walk through Oxford to see various examples of inscriptions and material letters. For material which is disparate or difficult of access, handouts with preparatory reading or images will usually be supplied. Though the bulk of the material will be on text from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some weeks will include passages from earlier and later texts, and students on MSt strands of all periods are invited to participate.
Week 1: Shape Poetry, Poetic Form, and Micrographical Art This week considers ways in which poets in print and manuscript used the graphical form of letters and poems to create works which are at once visual and verbal, alongside the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for micrographical portraits: images composed entirely of lines of minute text. We will consider passages from Simmias of Rhodes and the Greek Anthology; Richard Willes, Poematum liber (1573); James VI and I, Essayes of a Prentise (1585); George Puttenham, The Arte of
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English Poesie (1589); George Herbert, The Temple (1632); and prints by Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Buchinger, and Michael Püchler der Jüngere.
Week 2: The World as Universal Manuscript This week considers the metaphor of world as book, or as composed of letters, and the relationship between literature and early modern natural philosophy, or science, conceived of as reading the world. We will examine the topic from three perspectives: (i) the idea of the world as spoken or written by God (passages from Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici; Francis van Helmont’s Alphabet of Nature; Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi); (ii) atoms as letters (Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura; Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Traherne’s atom poems); (iii) the fascination of period for tiny writing and magnification (Robert Hooke’s Micrographia; examples of micrographical and miniature writing).
Week 3: Looking at Letters and the Meaning of Type One of the senses in which letters signified beyond the semantics of the words in which they appear in the period is in the different valences carried by particular typefaces. This week we will examine some works which use different typefaces (Roman, italic, black-letter) to signify in different ways: Aldus Manutius’s Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (1492) and its translation into English (1592); Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), as well as considering the ways in which Oxford presses in the seventeenth century went about acquiring type for all the languages – Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. – which were required for scholarly printing in the period. We will also look at several examples of text as included in woodcuts, engravings, and title- pages in early modern books, in the banderols and banners which contain speech, inscriptions, representations of architecture, etc.
Week 4: Epigrams, Epitaphs, and Inscribed Words This week considers the origins of alphabets and letters in engravings, cuts, and incisions, and the long history of poetry and writing as inscription. We will return to the Greek Anthology, encountered in the first week, to assess epigrams as situated poetry; and compare Ben Jonson’s Epigrams and the emblem poems of the c17th. This week will also involve a walk in Oxford to see several examples of engraved and material texts in the architectural fabric of the place.
Week 5: The Animate Letter This week addresses works in which letters take on some kind of agency or symbolism of their own. Beginning with Lucian’s The Consonants at Law – in which sigma and tau argue before a jury of vowels over their relative merits – we will consider passages of John Donne’s sermons; Shakespeare, King Lear; and Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno.
Week 6: The Arbitrary Letter: Opacity, Nonsense, and Dreams of Decipherment The final week will examine letters which are not meant to be read, or are to be read only by the initiate, in whose number we for some reason can’t consider ourselves. Among other examples, we will look at The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript book, which appears to be a scientific treatise, but is written entirely in a script which is yet to be deciphered; Thomas More’s Utopian alphabet, and its influence; Francis Bacon’s biliteral cipher, and his discussions of hieroglyphs; and John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character (1688).
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The Forensic Imagination Professor Lorna Huston ([email protected])
Roberto Unger proposes that society ‘reveals through its law the innermost secrets of the manner in which it holds men together’. In England after the Reformation, there was a sharpening of constitutional debate on the sovereign ‘exception’ (the monarch’s prerogative power), while an exponential growth in litigation led to a general law-mindedness and an identification of legal procedure with political rights. In grammar school, forensic rhetoric underpinned literary composition of all kinds. In plays and stories, family dynamics and emotions are legally inflected and much energy is spent in construing signs and proofs. Conscience, the forumDr of inward judgement, undergoes transformation by the changed relations of spiritual and secular jurisdictions. The period also sees the emergence of international law. This option will introduce students to a number of distinct aspects of early modern legal culture that enhance the understanding of literary texts, early modern and modern. Students of English and American literature of later periods may also benefit from learning about the procedures, languages and institutions that underlie modern Anglo-American common law and popular culture (see, e.g., Carol Clover, ‘Law and the Order of Popular Culture’, in in Law in the Domains of Culture ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Michigan, 2001). We’ll cover the study of classical forensic rhetoric; the social-historical turn to ‘fiction in the archives’, debates on constitutional revolution, political theology and the ‘liberties of the Englishman’ as an incipient discourse of human rights, but also as an architecture of Anglo-British empire.
Week 1. Forensic rhetoric and humanist education.
In this seminar, we will look at forensic rhetoric – the rhetoric of the lawcourts – as it underpinned humanist education in copia, or the composition of persuasive writing of all kinds, including familiar letters and literary texts. We’ll look in particular at the passages of Erasmus’s On Copia which teach students how to invent proofs, and we will distinguish an early modern discourse of the ‘probable’ from its Enlightenment counterpart.
Reading: Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas tr. D. B. King and H. D. Rix (Wisconsin: Marquette, 1999), book 2.
Kathy Eden, ‘Forensic rhetoric and humanist education’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 ed. Lorna Hutson (OUP, 2017), 23-40. Quintilian, Institutia oratoria (‘The orator’s education’) trans. Donald Russell (Harvard, 2001) book 4, chs 2-5 (on narrative) and book 5 (on proofs) Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’ in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe ed. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 54-72. Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2014), 11-48. Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (OUP, 2015), 76-86.
Week 2. Interpreting intention 1: Courtship and marriage This week we’ll look at legal cases turning on evidence of intention to marry, and at how such disputes enter rhetoric manuals and stage comedies.
Reading: Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553) ed. Peter E. Medine (Penn State, 1994). Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister Doister in Three Sixteenth Century Comedies ed. Charles Whitworth (London: Benn, 1980).
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Martin Ingram, ‘Matrimonial Causes: Marriage Formation’ in Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 189- 218. Laura Gowing, ‘The Economy of Courtship’ and ‘, in Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, 139-179 Subha Mukherji, “‘Of rings and things and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty” in Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006) 17-54. John March, Actions for Slander (1647) 29-32.
Week 3. The Inns of Court: poetry, drama, politics This week we turn to the Inns of Court as England’s ‘third university’. We will ask what was specifically legal, if anything, about Inns of Court literary culture. We will also ask whether the involvement of Inns of Court men in dramatic entertainments and literary production had a specific political character.
Reading: Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc (1561) ed. I. B. Cauthen (Edward Arnold, 1970). John Donne, Satires 3 and 4, in John Donne the Major Works ed. J. Carey (Oxford, 2008).
Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court (Oxford, 2015), 173-193. Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2004). Archer, Jane Elisabeth, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight eds., The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Inns of Court (Manchester, 2011). Gregory Kneidel, John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satires (Pittsburgh, 2015). Martin Butler, ‘The Legal Masque: Humanity and Liberty at the Inns of Court’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Law and Literature (Oxford, 2016), 180-197.
Week 4. Interpreting intention (2): Contract This week we’ll look at the complexities of promising and contracting, as well as at what Tim Stretton calls the ‘collective loss of contractual innocence’ dramatized in city comedy.
Reading: Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614). Middleton, The Widow (1615).
Luke Wilson, ‘Ben Jonson and the Law of Contract’ in Law and Literature, vol. 5, (1993) 281-306). Tim Stretton, ‘Contract and Conjugality’ in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford, 2016) 410-30. Bell, H. E. An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Sir Edmund Coke, Slade’s Case, in The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knight, ed. J. H. Thomas and J. Farquhar, 6 vols., 1826 (repr. New Jersey, Lawbook Exchange: 2002) 2.501-512. David Harris Sacks, ‘The Promise and the contract in Early Modern England: Slade’s Case in Perspective’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe ed. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 28-53.
Week 4. Crimes of blood. This week students will choose a murder pamphlet from EEBO and will analyze its representation of hierarchies of social agency and its rhetoric of proof and of providential discovery.
Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Crimes of blood and their representation’ and ‘Murder, prosecution and proof’ in
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Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 203-241, 242-280. Cynthia Herrup, ‘From crime to criminal accusation’, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth Century England, 67-92. Cynthia Herrup, ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 106 (1985) 102-123. John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Harvard, 1974). Subha Mukherji, ‘Evidence and representation in “the theatre of God’s judgements”’, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2007) 55-94. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (Yale, 2002). John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Linda Woodbridge, Revenge Tragedy: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge, 2010).
Week 5. Political theologies: The King’s Two Bodies. This week we’ll look at the early twentieth century reading of ‘political theology’ into Renaissance legal and literary texts.
Shakespeare, Richard II or Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton,1957 – repr. 1997). Marie Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977) Victoria Kahn, ‘Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies’, Representations, 106 (2009) 77-101. Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 4 or Alan Cromartie, ‘The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present 163 (1999) 76-120. Henry Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth (Chicago, 2016).
Week 6. ‘The Ancient Constitution’: English or British? For our final week, we will look at Edward Coke’s insistence on deriving of English law from a mythic British history, asking what this meant in terms of Anglo-Scots relations and English expansionism.
Shakespeare, Cymbeline.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain tr. Neil Wright (Boydell, 2007) book 4.65-72. George Garnett, ‘ “the oulde fields”: Law and History in the Prefaces to Sir Edward Coke’s Reports’, The Journal of Legal History (2013) 34.3, 245-284. Paul D. Halliday, ‘Birthrights and Due Course of Law’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Law and Literature (Oxford, 2016), 180-197. Mary Nyquist, ‘Base Slavery and Roman Yoke’, Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Law and Literature (Oxford, 2016), 624-645. Alan MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45.2 (2006) 248-269.
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Transformation of the Epic from Milton to Byron Nicholas Halmi ([email protected])
To speak of a modern epic is something of a paradox because epic is the oldest genre in the Western poetic tradition and the one with the most imposing ancient exemplars. And yet the genre proves an irresistible challenge to poets even after the rise of the novel, a genre which might seem more appropriate to a mercantile class and to philosophies of individualism. This seminar will examine how Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Byron’s Don Juan—a religious poem, an autobiographical poem, and a satirical poem—respond to the conditions and challenges of modernity through and against epic convention, and how the genre itself is transformed as a result.
Students are strongly advised to read at least Paradise Lost and The Prelude over the vacation. We shall spend roughly two classes on each poem, and selected secondary readings will be supplied in PDF or photocopy. Essays may include discussion of other epics, epic-like poems, or mock-epics in the period 1660–1830.
Recommended editions: John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Longman Annotated Edition, 1997) William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. N. Halmi (Norton Critical Edition, 2013; corr. 2nd printing, 2017) [N.B. We shall read the 13-book, 1805 version of the poem] or William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (21st-Century Oxford Authors, 2012) Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. J.J. McGann (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008)
Schedule:
Week 1: Paradise Lost Topics for discussion: Milton’s relation to epic tradition (Christian vs. national subject), choice of epic vs. tragedy, choice of blank verse, functions of the invocations
Week 2: Paradise Lost Problems of characterization (‘neither human actions nor human manners’—Samuel Johnson), relation to allegory (esp. Sin and Death), representation of history (biblical vs. human), impact on subsequent English poets
Week 3: The Prelude Contingencies of the poem’s beginning and complications of the text(s), development of The Recluse project (and the place of The Prelude in it), the idea of ‘philosophic Song’, use of Milton as a model, relation to Wordsworth’s own ‘conversation poems’ and role of Coleridge
Week 4: The Prelude Narrative sturcture, relation to autobiography, representation of temporality (abrupt shifts in chronology), representation of multiple perspectives (childhood experiences, adult reflections)
Week 5: Don Juan Relation to mock-epic tradition (esp. Alexander Pope) and romance, strategy of dissociation from ‘Lake Poets’ (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey), use of ottava rima instead of blank verse, use of Don Juan legend and idea of the heroic (‘I want a hero’), centrality of social (esp. gender) relations
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Week 6: Don Juan Narrative structure (absence of determined plan, digressiveness), engagement with historical events and contemporary life, role of the narrator and intrusiveness of Byron himself, comedic vs. satirical aspects (W.H. Auden’s distinction), diction (‘a genuine comic language’—Goethe on Don Juan)
Selected secondary readings: The focus is on questions of genre. Extracts of some of these will be supplied for class, but the primary purpose of the list is to give you points of departure, reference, and provocation for your own essays.
EPIC IN GENERAL: Bates, Catherine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010) [introductory essays ranging chronologically from Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott’s Omeros; good essays by David Loewenstein on 17th-c. Protestant epic and Michael O’Neill on Romantic epic] Curran, Stuart, British Romanticism and Poetic Form (1986) [includes a good chapter on epic] Frye, Northrop, Anatony of Criticism (1957), pp. 315–26 Greene, Roland (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd ed. (2012; available online through SOLO), s.v. ‘epic’ [an excellent survey of theory and practice; the corresponding article in the preceding edition, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993), may also be consulted] 2 Hainsworth, J. B., The Idea of Epic (1991) Johns-Putra, Adeline, The History of Epic (2006) Kennedy, William, ‘Heroic Poem before Spenser’, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990) [relevant to Milton too] Lord, George DeForest, Heroic Mockery (1977) Merchant, Paul, The Epic (1971; available online on Bodleian computer terminals) [introductory] Nuttall, A. D., Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (1992) Parker, Patricia, Inescapable Romance (1979) [on the entwinement of romance with epic, from Spenser to Keats] Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, ‘Heroic Poem since Spenser’, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990) Robertson, Ritchie, Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (2009) [includes a chapter on Byron] Swedenberg, H.T., Jr., The Theory of the Epic in England 1650–1800 (1944) Tucker, Herbert, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2009) [includes extended discussions of Wordsworth and Byron] Wilkie, Brian, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (1965) [includes chapters on Wordsworth and Byron]
MILTON: Critical edition: The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F.A. Patterson, vol. 2 (1931) [part of the so-called Columbia Milton, to be superseded by the fothcoming vol. 1 of the Oxford Complete Poetical Works] Budick, Sanford, Poetry of Civilization: Mythopoeic Displacement in the Verse of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson (1974)
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Ferry, Anne, Milton’s Epic Voice: the Narrator in ‘Paradise Lost” (1963) Gregerson, Linda, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (1995) Lewalski, Barbara, ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost’, in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton (2nd ed., 1999) —— ‘Paradise Lost and the Contest over the Modern Heroic Poem’, Milton Quarterly 43 (2009): 153–64 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, The Ruins of Allegory: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (1998) [on the poem’s relation to allegory] Martindale, Charles, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (1986; 2nd ed., 2002) Stevens, Paul, ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative’, Milton Studies, 34 (1996), 3–21 Teskey, Gordon, ‘Milton’s Choice of Subject in the Context of Renaissance Critical Theory’, ELH, 53 (1986), 53–72. Revised version in his Delirious Milton (2006) —— The Poetry of John Milton (2016) Treip, Mindele Anne, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1994) [part 3 is devoted to PL] Webber, Joan Malory, Milton and His Epic Tradition (1979) See also the article by Loewenstein in Bates (first section)
WORDSWORTH: Critical edition: The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark Reed, 2 vols. (1991) [part of the Cornell Wordsworth series] Colloway, Catherine, ‘Wordsworth’s Prelude as Autobiographical Epic’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 141 (Jan. 2008), 13–19 Gill, Stephen, The Prelude (1991) [very good introduction to the poem in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series] Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and “The Recluse” (1984) [on the larger epic project of which The Prelude was to be a part] —— “Wordsworth and The Recluse,” in Stephen Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Wordsworth (2003) Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s “Prelude” (1963) [classic analysis of the poem’s epic conventions, though centred on the 1850 version of the poem] Lucy Newlyn, “Paradise Lost” and the Romantic Reader (1992) Peterfreund, Stuart, ‘The Prelude: Wordsworth’s Metamorphic Epic’, Genre 14 (1981), 441– 72 Rajan, Tilottama, ‘The Other Reading: Transactional Epic in Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth’, in Lisa Low and Anthony Harding (eds.), Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (1994), pp. 20–46 Thomas Vogler, Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hart Crane (1971) See also the article by O’Neill in Bates (first section).
BYRON: Critical edition: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J.J. McGann, vol. 5 (1986) [thorough annotation and discussion of textual issues]
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Barton, Anne, Don Juan (1992) [good introduction to the poem in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series] Halmi, Nicholas, ‘The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem’, Europan Romantic Review 21 (2010), 589–600 [includes brief comparison of Don Juan with Paradise Lost and The Prelude] Haslett, Moyra, Byron’s “Don Juan” and the Don Juan Legend (1997) Lauber, John, ‘Don Juan as Anti-Epic’, SEL, 8 (1968), 607–19 McGann, Jerome, “Don Juan” in Context (1976) [influential historicist interpretation of the poem] Mozer, Hadley, ‘“I WANT a hero”: Advertising for an Epic Hero in Don Juan’, Studies in Romanticism, 44 (2005), 239–60 Reiman, Donald, ‘Don Juan in Epic Context’, Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 587–94 See also the article by O’Neill in Bates (first section).
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Objects as Subjects in 18th Century Literature Professor Abigail Williams ([email protected]) Dr. Giovanna Vitelli ([email protected])
This course will use an object-based approach to consider a range of eighteenth century texts, and the ways in which both objects and texts frame the intellectual, cultural and economic issues of this period. The course will draw on the interdisciplinary expertise of Prof. Abigail Williams (eighteenth- century English literature) and Dr Giovanna Vitelli (art history and anthropology). Working with objects, texts and images from the Ashmolean museum, the Museum of the History of Science and from the Bodleian, students will be encouraged to examine the significance of material culture within literary forms, and to look at the ways in which the citation of objects enables us to reconsider the role of space, gender, status, class and consumption within the literature of the period. Following an introductory session on approaches and the use of surviving evidence, the course will be divided into 5 thematic seminars, where the study of text and object will be integrated in the exploration of some key issues: consumerism; virtue; vice; science; the materiality of books. The six sessions will be co-taught in the Ashmolean Museum, the Museum of the History of Science, and in the Weston Library, drawing on relevant collections and handling objects.
Course Syllabus
1. Objects in Context. An introduction to ‘thinking through objects’ for the 18c. What can we learn from Yorick’s snuff box? How might a new attention to things enrich our understanding of the texts in which they are embedded? In this introductory session we will use a passage from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey to focus a discussion on the potential for alternative interpretations by looking at the deliberate citation of objects in a literary context – in this case, a snuff box. We will look at forms of evidence – diaries, fiction, exhibition catalogues, and snuffboxes from the museum collection – and examine the kinds of evaluative and critical assumptions they embody. We will also consider the parallels between canonicity and survival in print and material culture.
2. Consumerism. This session opens up the broad theme of consumer acquisition and the trade in luxury objects in this period. It will consider the contemporary tensions between consumerism and frugality. We will look at the co-existence in this era of on the one hand, the passion for excess and for ornate luxury objects, and on the other, the aesthetic and moral appeal of restraint. Texts include Pope’s Rape of the Lock and John Pomfret’s The Choice.
3. Virtue. In this week we will look at the gendering of virtue in text and object. Moving from the culture of virtue centring on domestic crafts such as embroidery, to the dilution of this theme in, for example contemporary teawares, we will consider the notion of exemplarity, and the ways in which social practice and material culture embody narratives of female virtue. How far is fictional virtue patterned on an emblematic typology of virtuous women also evident in contemporary material culture? And how far is material culture shaped by fictional examples? Texts include Richardson’s Pamela and a selection of contemporary conduct literature.
4. Vice. This week explores the erotic and the illicit in eighteenth century visual imagery and its connections to contemporary concerns about social issues such as prostitution and sexual licence. We will look at narratives of moral decline – and the voyeurism implicit within these – in Fanny Hill and Tom Jones and relate the readings to the works of the artist William Hogarth, a noted satirist, philanthropist and reformer.
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5. Science. This session addresses the popularisation of scientific discovery in non scientific forms – in material culture, and poetry. In doing so it emphasises the importance of the conspicuous display of scientific knowledge, and its reflection in eighteenth century domestic culture. We will trace the creative afterlives of Linnaean and Newtonian theories in polite circles, through personal scientific instruments, domestic ceramics and poetry, and consider the aesthetic appeal of new ways of thinking. Texts include: Thomson’s Seasons; selection from eighteenth-century anthologies and miscellanies.
6. Materiality of the book By arrangement with Andrew Honey and the conservation department of the Weston Library. This week will challenge the duality of text vs material culture by looking at the materiality of books, their formats and bindings.
INTRODUCTORY READING FOR FIRST CLASS
Prown, J.D. (1982) “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17(1):1-19. C. Gosden, and Y. Marshall (1999). "The Cultural Biography of Objects." World Archaeology 31(2): 169-178.
PRIMARY TEXTS FOR WEEKLY SEMINARS
1: Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey 2: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, John Pomfret, ‘The Choice’ 3: Samuel Richardson, Pamela and selections from contemporary conduct literature 4: John Cleland, Fanny Hill, selections from Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 5: James Thomson, The Seasons, Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants 6: ’The Adventures of a Quire of Paper’
GENERAL READING
Batchelor, Jennie and Cora Kaplan, Women and Material Culture 1660-1830 (2007) Berg, Maxine, and Elizabeth Eger, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: debates, desires and delectable goods (2003) Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer (eds), The consumption of culture, 1600-1800: image, object, text (1997) especially chapters by Lovell, Wilson, Klein and Bermingham Berry, Christopher The Idea of Luxury (1994) Blackwell, Mark, et al British It-Narratives, 1750–1830 (Pickering and Chatto 2012) Blackwell, Mark ed, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth- Century England Davies, K., ‘A moral purchase: femininity, commerce, abolition, 1788-1792’, in E. Eger and C. Grant (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (2001) De Grazia, V, and E Furlough (eds), The sex of things: gender and consumption in historical perspective (1996) Ellis (Markman 2010) . Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England. (Pickering and Chatto 2010) Festa, Lynn Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2006) Gunn, S, ‘The public sphere, modernity and consumption: new perspectives on the history of the English middle class’, in A Kidd and D Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-class identity in Britain, 1800-1940 (1999) Harvey, Karen, History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Routledge 2012) Jones, Robert, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-century Britain (1998)
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Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, Consuming Subjects: British Women and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1996) Lupton, Tina “The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century” NOVEL: a Forum on Fiction. 39.3, Summer 2006. 402-420 McKendrick, Neil John Brewer and John Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982) Park, Julie The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, 2010) Solkin, David Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 1993). Styles, John The Dress of the People (2007) Symonds, James Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining AD 1700-1900. Oxford, Oxbow Books. (2010) Trentmann, Frank, (ed) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012) Vickery, Amanda The Gentleman’s Daughter (1999) Vickery, Amanda, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009) Weatherill, Lorna Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (1988)
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Dickens the Novelist Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ([email protected])
On the centenary of Dickens’s death in 1970, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis published Dickens the Novelist, a collection of essays that was at once a celebration and a public recantation. ‘Our purpose’, they wrote, ‘is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers’. This C course aims to reconsider Dickens’s aims and techniques as a novelist, by measuring a number of major fictional works against some of the other forms in which he wrote.
Each seminar will focus on at least one particular work in relation to a sampling of literary parallels, complements and rivals from elsewhere in Dickens’s career, including his journalism, short stories, letters, poetry, travel writings, theatrical works, public readings, speeches and letters.
Starting with Sketches by Boz – a work that was in effect a series of rehearsals and warm-up routines for Dickens’s later career – we will move on to Oliver Twist (his first attempt at a 3-volume novel), David Copperfield (a disguised autobiography written by a fictional novelist), A Tale of Two Cities (a novel published in weekly serial form), and finally a pair of works that show Dickens’s interest in the foreign and familiar from two different angles: American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. These works form a set of stepping-stones across Dickens’s career, but in their final essays participants will be free to negotiate them – or avoid them – in any way they wish.
The order of seminars will be as follows:
Week 1: Sketches by Boz
Week 2: Oliver Twist
Week 3: David Copperfield
Week 4: A Tale of Two Cities
Week 5: American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit
Week 6: Individual student meetings / Conclusions
Participants should ensure that they have read these works before the start of term. Good editions include those published by Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics; many of the OUP editions incorporate the scholarship of the definitive Clarendon texts, although the Penguin editions sometimes offer interesting alternative angles – eg. Philip Horne’s edition of Oliver Twist, which reprints the text as it was originally serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany.
A full critical bibliography will be provided at the first seminar, although participants may find it helpful if they have familiarized themselves with some of the following:
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-4), edited with notes by A. J. Hoppé (1966). Modern biographies include those by Edgar Johnson, Peter Ackroyd, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Slater. Philip Collins, Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971) and Stephen Wall (ed.), Dickens: A Critical Anthology (1970): two excellent anthologies that outline Dickens’s critical reception from the 1830s onwards.
David Paroissien (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 51) (2008). Other cross-sections through Dickens’s career include The
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Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens and Paul Schlicke (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens (rev. ed. 2011), which offers a generous selection of short survey accounts of various topics.
Introductions to the Victorian novel include the following:
Francis O’Gorman (ed.), The Victorian Novel (2002) Gail Marshall, Victorian Fiction (2002) J Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968) Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (ed.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002) E. D. Ermath, The English Novel in History, 1840-1895 (1997)
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Victorian Drama Dr Sophie Duncan ([email protected])
Victorian theatre was the definitive artistic medium of the era, central to the recreation of rich and poor alike. The geography of Victorian cities shifted with the advent entertainment districts dedicated to the pleasures of theatregoing (and other less salubrious recreations). By the 1850s, tens of thousands of Londoners visited the West End theatres every night. This course introduces sixty years of innovative, controversial, and popular drama, illuminating how well-known fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Wilde and Shaw both appropriated and revolutionised the tropes and innovations of mid-century domestic drama. The course’s parameters are defined by political theatre, beginning with melodrama’s theatricalising of dissent for working-class audiences, and ending with suffragist drama’s feminist explorations of capitalism, corruption, abortion, and rage. Along the way we will consider gender and sexuality, censorship, the status of actresses, theatrical innovation, and the economics of the marketplace. Seminars will explore a wide variety of plays, from uproarious farces to savage interrogations of Victorian attitudes to disability and race. Alongside plays, we will examine journalism, essays, and theatre historiography from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, introducing the methodological issues that underpin the most complex and creative scholarship on theatre.
The list below introduces the key themes, texts, and criticism for the course. The best-known authors (Wilde, Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg) are available in OUP editions: the vast majority of the list, however, is available for free online, either through Drama Online or via archive.org, often in the first published editions. A full list of recommended critical reading and suggested additional texts will be provided at the start of the course.
Week 1 – Melodrama and Sensation Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (1859) and The Colleen Bawn (1860). Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1861, adapted by T.A. Palmer). Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893).
Week 2 – Realism and marital ‘bliss’ Tom Taylor, Victims (1857). T.W. Robertson, Society (1865) and Caste (1867). Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879). Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’ (1888 essay).
Week 3 – Genre fin-de-siècle: sex and the fallen woman Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895). George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894, performed 1902).
Week 4 – Europe advances: Science and Naturalism Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts (1881) and reviews of the 1891 English premiere. August Strindberg, The Father (1887). Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, Alan’s Wife (1893). George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906).
Week 5 – Comedy: laughter and respectability William Schwenk Gilbert, Engaged (1878). Henry Arthur Jones, The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894). Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest (both 1895).
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Week 6 – Performing Politics George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Late Censor’, The Saturday Review (2 March 1895) and ‘The Censorship of the Stage in England’ The Saturday Review (August 1899). Clement Scott, ‘Does The Theatre Make For Good?’ (1897 interview). Harley Granville Barker, Waste (1906 version). Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women (1907). Cicely Hamilton, Diana of Dobson’s (1908).
Key Secondary Texts Michael Booth, Theatre in The Victorian Age (Cambridge, CUP: 1991). Jacky Bratton, New Readings In Theatre History (Cambridge, CUP: 2003). Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2004). Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, OUP: 2016). Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford, OUP: 2013). Russell Jackson (ed.), Victorian Theatre: The Theatre In Its Time (Franklin, NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1988). Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre & Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660– 2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Thomas Postlewait, Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge, CUP: 2009). Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York: Columbia UP, 2015). John Stokes, In The Nineties (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990). ---. ‘Varieties of performance at the fin de siècle’ in Gail Marshall (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 207–22.
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High Modernism and Children’s Literature Professor Diane Purkiss ([email protected])
Of late, children’s literature has sometimes been hailed as a refuge from the difficulties of high modernism, a place where narrative is simple and stories still about good and evil. However, in fact the major creators and extenders of high modernism were deeply invested in children’s literature, in the Romantic idea of the child, in nonsense and babble as places for linguistic experimentation, and in Rousseauan primitivism, animals, and fragments of ancient myths as spaces of cultural freedom. In turn, writers for children such as Alan Garner and William Mayne turned increasingly to modernism as a means of writing for children without patronising them. In this exploration, we will learn both about what children’s literature is and about how high modernism rests on the idea of the child, as firmly as ever romanticism did.
Among the texts we will read are:
Virginia Woolf – Witcherina and textual play, Nurse Lugton’s Curtain and The widow and the parrot James Joyce The Cat and the Devil, The Cats of Copenhagen Ernest Hemingway – The Faithful Bull and the plain style William Faulkner – The Wishing Tree Gertrude Stein, To do: an alphabet book T S Eliot – Lear, play, nonsense and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – myths for children Sylvia Plath, The Bed Book Ted Hughes, The Iron Man and How the Whale Became Randall Jarrell The Bat Poet, and Kenneth Koch, Rose, where did you get that red? Alan Garner and William Mayne – high modernism for children. Garner, Red Shift, Thursbitch Mayne, Sand, Drift We will also be reading extensively in modernist personal writings and we will be reading recent theoretical studies of children and children’s literatureby Jacuqline Rose, Perry Nodelman and David Rudd.
We will also be contextualising by reading these texts adjacent to others; so with Woolf, To The Lighthouse and Angelica Garnett’s memoir Deceived with Kindness; with Joyce, Portrait, of course; with Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, for example. Obviously with Plath there’s a ridiculous amount that’s relevant, especially ‘Daddy’, ‘You’re’ and the story ‘The Shadow’. Hughes, ditto – just sooo much! – but obviously the children’s poem collections and lots in Birthday Letters.
General
ABELL Hodgkins, Hope Howell.: "High Modernism for the lowest: children's books by Woolf, Joyce, and Greene." Children's Literature Association Quarterly (32:4) 2007, 354-67. (2007)
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Rudd, David: "Children's Literature and the Return to Rose" Children's Literature Association Quarterly , (35:3), 2010, 290-310. (In special issue: "The (Im)Possibility of Children's Fiction: Rose Twenty-Five Years On".) . (2010)
Week I What is modernism and what is children’s lit?
Critical reading Modernism [electronic resource] Whitworth, Michael H 2007 | Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub Introduction and ‘Modernism and Romanticism’ Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 1993 | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Pres Chapters 1-3.
Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult, 2008 | Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press
Literary reading Ernest Hemingway – The Faithful Bull and the plain style
If you haven’t read Ferdinand, to which EH refers in the first sentence of TFB, it might be worth doing so
Fiesta/aka The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer (you don’t need to read the whole of these last two, but DA is helpful for TFB)
For further reading: The Hemingway Paris Review interview, Hemingway and Genders, Gregory Hemingway’s autobiography, Papa. Hemingway’s letters, ed. Carlos Baker.
Week 2 Literary texts Virginia Woolf, Nurse Lugton’s Curtain and The widow and the parrot
To the Lighthouse
James Joyce The Cat and the Devil, The Cats of Copenhagen
Portrait of the artist as a young man
Other Reading Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 547ff
Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, on nonsense.
Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness
ABELL Bazargan, Susan.: review of Joyce, James. "The cats of Copenhagen." James Joyce Literary Supplement (27:1) 2013, 6-7. (2013)
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Sigler, Amanda.: "Crossing folkloric bridges: the cat, the devil, and Joyce." James Joyce Quarterly (45:3/4) 2008, 537-55. (2008)
Williams, Keith.: "'Sperrits in the furniture': Wells, Joyce and animation, before and after 1910." Literature and History (22:1) 2013, 95-110. (2013)
Week 3
T S Eliot – Carroll, Lear, play, nonsense and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats TS Eliot ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ and ‘How unpleasant to know Mr Eliot’ Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Inventions of the March Hare (ed Ricks) Lewis Carroll’s nonsense parodies in The Annotated Alice Nonsense in The Waste Land and in the manuscript of The Waste Land(working title ‘He do the police in different voices) Criticism Bevis, Matthew. Comedy; A Very Short Introduction, OUP 2013.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot: The Early Years.
Chesterton, Gilbert K., A Defence of Nonsense, in The Defendant, London, R. Brimley Johnson, 1901, pp. 42-50.
Baker, William, T.S. Eliot on Edward Lear: An Unnoted Attribution, English Studies, 64, 1983, pp. 564-566.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, How Pleasant Is It To Know Mr. Lear?, American Book Collector, 7.1, 1986, pp. 21-27
Hedberg, Johannes: "T. S. Eliot, Old Possum and Cats" Moderna Sprak , (78:2), 1984, 97-105. (1984)
Elizabeth Sewell, ‘Lewis Carroll and T.S Eliot as Nonsense Poets’, in T.S Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner.
Week 4 Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – myths for children and mythic children?
Literary texts Sylvia Plath, The Bed Book, ‘You’re’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Edge’, ‘Morning Song’ and ‘Child’
Ted Hughes, The Iron Man and How the Whale Became, ‘Full moon and little Frieda’, Crow, and Birthday Letters; see too the links here http://www.earth-moon.org/th_children.html
Randall Jarrell The Bat Poet, and Kenneth Koch, Rose, where did you get that red?
Criticism The biographical accounts of both have been deformed by faction fights, and are best skipped except for the DNB entries. Instead, read Plath’s Journals and Letters Home, and Hughes’s Letters.
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Tunstall, Lucy: "Aspects of Pastoral in Sylvia Plath's 'Child'" English: The Journal of the English Association , (58:222), 2009, 230-242. (English summary.) . (2009)
Kilfoil, Kara: "'The Child's Cry/Melts in the Wall': Frieda Hughes and a Contemporary Reading of Sylvia Plath" Plath Profiles: An International Journal of Studies on Sylvia Plath , (1:), 2008, 269-279. (In special issue: "Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford University, October 25-29, 2007.". Electronic publication.) . (2008)
McCort, Jessica Hritz: "Alice in Cambridge: Sylvia Plath, Little Girls Lost, and 'Stone Boy with Dolphin'" Plath Profiles: An International Journal of Studies on Sylvia Plath , (1:), 2008, 175-186. (In special issue: "Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford University, October 25-29, 2007.". Electronic publication.) . (2008)
Bentley, Paul: "Depression and Ted Hughes's Crow, or through the Looking Glass and What the Crow Found There" Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal , (43:1), 1997, 27-40
Bradshaw, Graham: "Ted Hughes' 'Crow' as Trickster-Hero" In (pp. 83-108) Williams, Paul V. A. , The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford , Cambridge, Eng.; Totowa, NJ: Brewer; Rowman & Littlefield, 1979
Katrovas, Richard. ‘Fame Envy’ Denver Quarterly , (34:4), 2000, 124-30. .
Churchwell, Sarah. ‘Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters’ Contemporary Literature , (42:1), 2001, 102-48.
Hunter, Dianne. ‘Poetics of Melancholy and Psychic Possession in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and Other Haunted Texts’ Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas , (1:1), 2003, 129-50.
Churchwell, Sarah. ‘Your Sentence Was Mine Too': Reading Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters Publication Details: In (pp. 260-87) Stone, Marjorie (ed. and introd.), Thompson, Judith (ed. and introd.), Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2006. xiv, 373 pp..
Kilfoil, Kara. ‘From 'Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters: Annotations and Commentary' Plath Profiles: An International Journal of Studies on Sylvia Plath, (3:), 2010, 192-211. (Electronic publication.)
Clark, Heather. The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2011.
Week 5 Alan Garner and William Mayne – high modernism for children.
Literary Texts Garner, Red Shift, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Boneland
Mayne, Sand, Drift
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Criticism Rudd, David. Reading the child in children's literature : an heretical approach, 2013 Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan
Rose, Peter Pan, details as above, Chapter 2 on Garner
Waller, Alison. Constructing adolescence in fantastic realism, 2011 | London : Routledge
Philip, Neil. A fine anger: a critical introduction to the work of Alan Garner 1981 London Collins
Butler, Charles: "Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of 'Tam Lin'" Children's Literature Association Quarterly , (26:2), 2001, 74-83. . (2001)
Nikolajeva, Maria: "The Insignificance of Time: Red Shift’ Children's Literature Association Quarterly, (14:3), 128-131. (1989)
Stephens, John: "Metafiction and Interpretation: William Mayne's Salt River Times, Winter Quarters, and Drift’ Children's Literature: Annual of The Modern Language Association Division on Children's Literature and The Children's Literature Association, (21:) 101-17. . (1993)
Hunt, Peter: "The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent: Quality and Value in Three Contemporary Children's Books" In (pp. 225-246) Chambers, Nancy (ed.) , The Signal Approach to Children's Books , Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/05/william-mayne-obituary
Garner, Alan. The voice that thunders : essays and lectures 1998 | London : Harvill Press
Week 6 Choose your own adventure; students each bring examples of material they find relevant.
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Contemporary Poetry Dr Erica McAlpine ([email protected])
Students often read poetry in period anthologies—The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, say, or The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse—or in large edited volumes titled something along the lines of William Wordsworth: The Major Works. But readers of contemporary poetry necessarily encounter poems as they appear in individual “collections”—slim volumes that usually work toward some particular mood, argument, or feeling. Reading poetry by the book instead of in an edited volume means paying attention not only to the poem at hand but also to what occurs around it: the poems printed just before and after it, its possible role (or roles) within the collection, and the immediate literary, cultural, and political contexts surrounding its publication. How does one poem connect to or shed light on the poems that precede or follow it in a volume? Are certain kinds of poems better for beginning or ending a book? What might we say about a collection as a whole that is distinct from what we might say about the individual poems within it? In what way might a collection of poems act as a response to another collection of poems published by the same, or a different, author? How does our current literary and political climate shape the kinds of books being published today? Can contemporary poetry exist outside of, or beyond, the book (i.e. digital poetry)? Throughout this course, you will read 12 books of poems published by living writers. Each week you should pay close attention to how the assigned collections work as a whole as well as to how they have been received by reviewers, other contemporary poets, and their various reading publics. How does Rae Armantrout’s Versed relate to the Language movement? Is Alice Oswald’s Memorial a translation, an “excavation,” or something altogether original? In what ways might a first book like Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade forge an identity—individual or collective? You will be asked to determine what makes a collection of poems a book, rather than a set of discrete poems, and you should try to relate the collections you read to other books of poetry being published today. In each seminar, we will explore two volumes in relation to one another, fostering this comparative approach.
TEXTS:
Frank Bidart: Desire (1997) Kay Ryan: Say Uncle (2000) John Ashbery: Your Name Here (2000) Anne Carson: If Not, Winter (2002) Don Paterson: Landing Light (2003) Paul Muldoon: Horse Latitudes (2006) Louise Gluck: Averno (2006) Rae Armantrout: Versed (2010) Alice Oswald: Memorial (2011) Alicia Stallings: Olives (2012) Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) Sarah Howe: Loop of Jade (2015)
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WEEKLY SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes (2006) & Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle (2000).
Possible topics for discussion: the personal vs. the political; transnational/cosmopolitan poetics; “stunt writing”; rhyme; cliché; didacticism; meaning and form; humour.
Suggested further reading: On Muldoon: Charles McGrath, “Word Freak,” New York Times Magazine (November 19, 2006): 60. Helen Vendler, “Anglo-Celtic Attitudes,” New York Review of Books 44, no. 17 (November 6, 1997): 58. Helen Vendler, “Fanciness and Fatality,” The New Republic 235 (2006): 26-33. James Fenton, “A poke in the eye with a poem,” The Guardian, October 21, 2006. Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). On Ryan: Kay Ryan, “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” Parnassus 23 (1998). Interview with Kay Ryan (by Sarah Fey), The Art of Poetry No. 94., The Paris Review. Adam Kirsch, “Think Small: America’s Quiet Poet Laureate,” The New Yorker, April 12, 2010. Frances Leviston, “Odd Blocks,” The Guardian, October 21, 2011. ___
Week 2: Don Paterson’s Landing Light (2003) & Alicia Stallings’s Olives (2012).
Possible topics for discussion: New formalism; classical reception; gender; motherhood/fatherhood; contemporary sonnets; poet as technician.
Suggested further reading: On Paterson: Matthew Reynolds, “So Much More Handsome,” London Review of Books 26:5 (March 4, 2004): 25-27. Adam Newey, “Flints and Sparks,” The Guardian, November 15, 2003. William Logan, “Victoria’s Secret,” The New Criterion, June 2006. On Stallings: Abigail Deutsch, “In the Penile Colony,” Poetry Magazine, October 1, 2012. Evan Jones, “A Then and a Now” PN Review 210, 39:4 (March-April 2013). A. E. Stallings, “Presto Manifesto!” Poetry Magazine, January 30, 2009. Erica McAlpine, “To Catch the Last Applause,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 33:1-2 (2013). ___
Week 3: Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (2002) & Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011)
Possible topics for discussion: Translation, excavation; fragments; contemporary poetry and war; simile; lacunae.
Suggested further reading: On Carson: Emily Wilson, “Tongue Breaks,” London Review of Books 26:1 (January 8, 2004). Daniel Mendelsohn, “In Search of Sappho,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2003. John D’Agata, “Stripped-Down Sappho,” The Boston Review, October 1, 2002) Anne Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” (pdf provided)
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Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters” (pdf provided) On Oswald: Sarah Crown, “Alice Oswald: Haunted by Homer” The Guardian, October 9, 2011. Eavan Boland, “Afterward to Alice Oswald’s Memorial.” Jason Guriel, Rosy-Fingered Yawn,” PN Review 207, 39:1 (September - October 2012). Phillip Womack, “Memorial by Alice Oswald,” The Telegraph, October 28, 2011. William Logan, “Plains of Blood: ‘Memorial,’ Alice Oswald’s Version of the ‘Iliad,’” New York Times Book Review, December 21, 2012.
Week 4: John Ashbery’s Your Name Here (2000) & Rae Armantrout’s Versed (2010).
Possible topics for discussion: life into poetry, or poetry into life; the Language school; meaning and form; elegy; should poetry make sense/should sense make poetry; avant- guarde/experimental/digital poetics vs. the “mainstream.”
Suggested further reading: On Ashbery: David Ward, “His Name Here,” PN Review 137, Volume 27 Number 3, January - February 2001. Melanie Rehak, “Your Name Here,” Salon, October 24, 2000. John Shoptaw. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. London: Harvard UP, 1994. David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. David Shapiro, John Ashbery, an Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1979. Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life. New York: FSG, 2017. On Armantrout: Dan Chiasson, “Entangled: The Poetry of Rae Armantrout,” The New Yorker, May 17, 2010. Rae Armantrout Versed Reader’s Companion: http://versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/ Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987). Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2002). see also the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, and the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) website at SUNY Buffalo.
Week 5: Frank Bidart’s Desire (1997) & and Louise Gluck’s Averno (2006)
Possible topics for discussion: Translation and imitation; the contemporary dramatic monologue; the use of myth; death, elegy.
Suggested further reading: On Bidart: Dan Chiasson, “Presence: Frank Bidart,” Raritan 20:4. David Gewanter, “Desire” (Review) Boston Review, April/May 1998. Langdon Hammer, “Frank Bidart and the Tone of Contemporary Poetry,” Southwest Review 87:1 (2002): 75-89. On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, eds. Liam Rector and Tree Swenson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007).
On Gluck: Nicholas Christopher, Art of Darkness, New York Times, March 12 2006. Adam Plunkett, The Knife—the Sharp Poetry of Louise Gluck, The New Republic, Jan 8 2013. Gillian White, Stand-up Vampire, LRB, Vol 35, No. 18, 26 Sept.2013.
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Week 6: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) & Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade (2015)
Possible topics for discussion: Poetry and identity; ways of writing about race/ethnicity; prose and mixed-genre poetry; language and image; “lyric.”
Suggested further reading: On Rankine: Nick Laird, “A New Way of Writing About Race,” The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015. Holly Bass, “Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2014. Dan Chiasson, “Color Codes,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2014. “Reconsidering Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.” A Symposium. Part I by Roderick A. Ferguson, Evie Shockley, Maria A. Windell & Daniel Worden, Los Angeles Review of Books, January 6, 2016. On Howe: Ben Wilkinson, “Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe,” The Guardian, January 12, 2016. Roger Cox, “Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe,” The Scotsman, May 3, 2015. Katy Evans-Bush, “TS Eliot prize row: is winner too young, beautiful - and Chinese?,” The Guardian, January 23, 2016. Oliver Thring, “Born in the rubbish tip, the greatest poetry of today,” The Sunday Times, January 17, 2016.
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Modernism and Philosophy Dr David Dwan ([email protected])
In 1898 W. B. Yeats announced that the artist ‘must be philosophical above everything, even about the arts.’ Modernists may not have directly followed the advice, but they often lived up to it. This course studies the reasons for this philosophical turn, while also examining an anti-philosophical strand within modernism – and arguably within modern philosophy itself. We shall consider some of the moral and epistemological debates that may have influenced modernist writers or might at least enhance our interpretation of their work. We will also consider the ways in which literature often seems to exceed or bewilder a philosophical method. The type of philosophy considered will be fairly catholic, but Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno will be recurrent figures. Writers studied on the course will include Joyce, Lewis, Stein, Stevens, Woolf and Yeats.
Provisional Outline
1. Introduction ‘It is self-evident that nothing, concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.’ (Adorno). We shall consider this question in an effort to determine how it may account for modernism’s philosophical turn. Primary Texts: Hegel, ‘Introduction’, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), vol. 1, 1- 105 (focus on Section 7: ‘Historical Deduction’). Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 1-8. Marinetti, ‘On The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909); Wyndham Lewis ‘Blast 1’ (1914) and ‘Blast 2’ (1915) Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918). Recommended Reading: Roger Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago, 2013); see too Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford, 1991); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Oxford, 1990); Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester, 1984).
2. Übermenschen ‘Nietzsche’s books are full of seductions and sugar-plums [. . .] and have made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe’ (Wyndham Lewis). In this class we shall consider Nietzsche’s influence on modernism and the extent to which he can be regarded as one of its early theorists or practitioners. Primary Texts: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstman and Judith Norman (Cambridge, 1992); 1-43; Friedrich Nietzsche, The On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford, 1994), Essays I & II; Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, ed. Scott Klein (Oxford, 2010). James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London, 1992); Mina Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’. John Burt Foster, Heirs to Dionysus (Princeton, 1981), Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (London, 2010), chap. 2; Scott Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Design and Nature (Cambridge, 1994); Sam Slote, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (New York, 2013); Anne Fernihough, Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism (Oxford, 2013); Jean Michel-Rabaté, The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns (London, 2016), chap. 3.
3. Ordinariness ‘Does what is ordinary always make the impression of ordinariness?’ (Wittgenstein). In this session we will explore concepts of the ordinary, the everyday, and the pre-theoretical in literature and philosophy. Primary Texts: Gertrude Stein, ‘Tender Buttons’; William Carlos Williams, ‘This is Just to Say’, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Wallace Stevens, ‘Of the Surface of Things’, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford,
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1978) 163-169; 381-423; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 2001), investigation no. 97-137. Recommended Texts: Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford, 2009); Lorraine Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Ashgate, 2010); Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: 2011).
4. The Grammar of Doubt ‘No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known’ (Woolf – ‘The Mark on the Wall’). In this session we shall examine to what extent Woolf can be regarded as a sceptic about knowledge, while also considering the broader role of doubt in her work. Primary Texts: Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ To the Lighthouse, The Waves; Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (London, 2001); Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction: On the Value of Scepticism,’ Sceptical Essays (London, 1928, repr. 2004). Recommended Texts. Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge, 2008); Megan Quigley, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form and Language (Cambridge, 2015), chap. 2.
5. Subjectivity and Art ‘Talk to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage’ (Yeats). In this session we shall consider how Yeats’s ideas about subjectivity influence his theory and practice of art. Primary Texts: Yeats, The Tower (Collection), ‘Blood and the Moon’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘The Statues’. Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morality; Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ and ‘Letter on Humanism,’ Basic Writings (London, 2010). Recommended Texts: Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche, (New York, 1982); Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 2001); H. L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger's Ontology of Art,” in H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford, 2005).
6. Negativity
‘All contemplation can do is no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations’ (Adorno). This week we will focus on Adorno, considering to what extent he articulates a coherent or satisfying philosophy of modernism. Primary Texts: Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, 1973), chap. 1; Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. J. E. N. Jephcott (London: 2005); Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 26 (1982): 119- 150. Recommended Texts: Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, chap. 5; Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton, 2005), chap. 10; Geuss, ‘Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno,’ Constellations, 12.1 (2005), 3-20.
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Empire and Nation Dr Graham Riach ([email protected]) Professor Elleke Boehmer ([email protected])
Ranging from R.L. Stevenson’s indictment of colonialism’s ‘world-enveloping dishonesty’, to Mulk Raj Anand’s divided responses to Bloomsbury and to Gandhi, this course investigates the literary and cultural perceptions, misapprehensions and evasions that accompanied empire, and through which challenges to empire were understood. We will examine resistance to empire that emerged both from social and textual margins, fractions and interstices, and from the nation as a locus where countervailing identities and solidarities were configured. The course is particularly interested in examining the literary antecedents of what we now call postcolonial writing, and in looking at some of the textual instances upon which colonial discourse theory has been founded. Special focus will be given to the intimations of modernist writing in the authors of empire, and to the disseminations of modernism in ‘national’ writing. Where possible, the conjunctions of empire writing with other, related discourses of the time – travel, New Woman, degeneration, social improvement, Freud, masculinity – will be traced. Each week we will consider one or two of the works of the key writers of empire and nation in the period, and critical and literary writing relating to them.
Course outline
Week 1 Imperial Pastoral: Introductory Session on Colonial Discourse
Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883) JM Coetzee, White Writing Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather Jed Esty, ‘The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe’, Victorian Studies, 49, 3 (2007), pp. 407-430 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, chs. 1 and 2 at least
Week 2 The View from the Beach
R. L. Stevenson, South Sea Tales, 1891, 1892, especially ‘The Beach of Falesa’ Katherine Mansfield, Collected Short Stories, Including: ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Garden Party’, ie. her longer short fiction Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing Pamila Gupta and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds), Eyes Across the Water
Film Screening Joshua Logan, South Pacific (1958) – Eng Fac PN.U65.L64 SOU DVD
See Also Dylan Thomas, The Beach of Falesa (1st broadcast 2014)
Week 3 Undiscovered Countries; New worlds
W.B. Yeats, Responsibilities (1914) E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
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Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (eds.) Modernism and Colonialism, chs, by May and Allen Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World Angela Smith, A Public of Two
This week and next you are welcome to book 10 minute slots to talk about your essay plans.
Film Screening David Lean, A Passage to India (1984) – Eng Fac PN.G7.L43 PAS DVD-S
Week 4 Adventure Tales
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901) Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908) If you wish: J.M Barrie, Peter Pan (1904) and/or Peter Pan and Wendy (1911)
Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies Joe Bristow, Empire Boys Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth Don Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy, ch 5 (‘Ethnography and the hybrid boy’) John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinity in Nineteenth Century Literature
Cornelia Sorabji, Selected writing from India Calling - optional
Film Screening Robert Day, She (1965) – Eng Fac PN.U65.P5335 SHE DVD
Week 5 Empire’s Certainties and Uncertainties
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) and ‘Youth’ (1898/1902)
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, Norton Anthology 7th edn Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance Christopher GoGwilt, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad etc. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism
Film Screening Werner Herzog, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Week 6 National stirrings
Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi (1930) Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1991) Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments Kristin Bluemel, Intermodernism
Film Screening BBC, Episode of Indian Summers (2015-2016)
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Selected further reading:
Amar Acheraiou, Rethinking Postcolonialism (Palgrave, 2008) Elleke Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing (1998) --- Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (2002) Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence, 2003 David Huddart, Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography, 2008 Amit Chaudhuri, D.H.Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (2003) Peter Childs, Modernism and the Post-Colonial (Continuum, 2007) Laura Chrisman, Re-reading the Imperial Romance (2000) W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903/2003) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1986) Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1995) Henry Louis Gates (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing and Difference (1986) Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (1996) Paul Gilroy, After Empire (2004) Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (eds), The Nature and Context of Minority Discourses, 1990 Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins, Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism, 1996 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, 1995 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson, 1995 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 1983 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004) Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse (2001) Sangeeta Ray, En-gendering India (2000) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 1994 Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985): 243-61 --, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1988 --, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, 1990 John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001) Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, 1989 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, 1995
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African Literature Dr Tiziana Morosetti ([email protected])
Ranging from Amos Tutuola’s classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) to Africa in contemporary science fiction, the course engages with some of the important cultural and political dynamics shaping the work of renowned African authors such as Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama Ata Aidoo and Ken Saro-Wiwa, as well as with the emerging talents of younger novelists and playwrights.
Titles marked with an asterisk in the ‘Background Reading’ section and weekly readings are compulsory.
Background Reading
Achebe, C. (1965), ‘English and the African Writer’, Transition, 18, pp. 27-30.* --- (2012), There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, London, Penguin. Adelugba, D., O. Obafemi, Adeyemi, S. (2004), ‘Nigeria’, in M. Banham (ed.), A History of Theatre in Africa, Cambridge University Press, pp. 138-158.* Adesanmi, Pius and Chris Dunton (2005), ‘Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations’, English in Africa, Vol. 32, No. 1, New Nigerian Writing (May, 2005), pp. 7-19.* Aidoo, A.A. (1988), ‘To Be an African Woman Writer: An Overview and a Detail’, in K. Holst (ed.), Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers’ Conference, Stockholm 1986, Uppsala, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, pp. 155-172.* Amuta, Chidi (1983), ‘The Nigerian Civil War and the Evolution of Nigerian Literature’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.17, No. 1, pp. 85-99.* Attree, Lizzy (2013), ‘The Caine Prize and Contemporary African Writing’, Research in African Literatures, 44 (2), 35-47. Coetzee, J.M. (2003), ‘The Novel in Africa’, in Elizabeth Costello, London, Vintage, pp. 35-58. Deandrea, P. (2002), Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi. Edoro, Ahinei (2016), ‘How Not to Talk about African Fiction’, The Guardian, 6 April. Feuser, Willfried F. (1988), ‘Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity’, Black American Literature Forum, 22 (3), Wole Soyinka Issue, Part 1 (Autumn), pp. 555-575.* Graham-White, Anthony and Alain Ricard (1976), ‘Between the Oral and the Written: Theatre in Ghana and Nigeria, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, May, pp. 229-238. Hewett, Heather (2005), ‘Coming of Age: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voice of the Third Generation’, English in Africa, Vol. 32, No. 1, New Nigerian Writing (May, 2005), pp. 73-97. Lindfors, B. (1982), ‘Popular Literature for an African Élite’, in Early Nigerian Literature, New York-London, Africana Publishing Company, pp. 75-90.* --- (1988), ‘Beating the White Man at his Own Game: Nigerian Reactions to the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature’, Black American Literature Forum, 22 (3), Wole Soyinka Issue, Part 1 (Autumn), pp. 475-488.* Newell, S. (2006), ‘Introduction: Where is West Africa?’, in West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, OUP, pp. 1-23.* Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2011) [1986], Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, James Currey.* Obafemi, Olu (1996), Contemporary Nigerian Theatre: Cultural Heritage and Social Vision, Bayreuth African Studies 40. Obiechina, Manuel (1973), An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets, Cambridge University Press, chapters 1-6 (pp. 1-71). Omotoso, K. (1996), Achebe or Soyinka? A Study in Contrasts, London, Hans Zell Publishers. Osofisan, F. (2001), ‘The Alternative Tradition: A Survey of Nigerian Literature in English since the Civil War’, in The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama and Culture, Trenton-Asmara, Africa World Press, pp. 161-187.
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Owomoyela, O. (2008), ‘The Literary and Cultural Context of West African Literature in English’, in The Columbia Guide to West African Literature in English since 1945, New York, Columbia UP, pp. 1-50.* Saro-Wiwa, Ken (1989), On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, Epsom, Saros. Soyinka, Wole (1976), ‘Drama and the African world-view’, in Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge University Press, pp. 37-60.* --- (1986), ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’, Nobel lecture. --- (1996), ‘Epilogue: Death of an Activist’, in The Open Sore of a Continent, Oxford University Press, pp. 145-154. Wehrs, D.R. (2008), Pre-Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives: From Ethiopia Unbound to Things Fall Apart, 1911-1958, Aldershot, Ashgate.
Course outline
Week 1: Towards Independence
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958 Amos Tutuola, Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952
Ogundele, Wole (2002), ‘Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the Postcolonial African Novel’, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 125- 139. Osofisan, F. (2001a), ‘Wonderland and the Orality of Prose: An Excursion into the World of the Tutuolans’, in The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama and Culture, Trenton-Asmara, Africa World Press, 1-42.
Week 2: Stage Encounters
Ama Ata Aidoo, Dilemma of a Ghost, 1965 Ola Rotimi, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, 1966 Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 1962 Efua Sutherland, The Marriage of Anansewa, 1975
Banham, M., E. Hill and G. Woodyard (eds., 1994), The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre, Cambridge UP, Part 19, Nigeria, pp. 67-92. Gibbs, James (2009), ‘Introduction: Theatre in Ghana’, in Nkyin-Kyin: Essays on the Ghanaian Theatre, Amsterdam, Rodopi, pp. xiii-xxv.
Week 3: Disillusionment
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People, 1966 Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 1968
Griffiths, G. (2000), ‘Self-criticism and Post-Independence Disillusion’ (section on West Africa), in African Literatures in English: East and West, Harlow, Longman, pp. 143-159. Lazarus, Neil (1987), ‘Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born”’, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 18, No. 2, Special Issue on Ayi Kwei Armah (Summer), pp. 137-175.
Week 4: ‘Tradition’ vs. ‘Revolution’
J.P. Clark, The Raft, 1966 Femi Osofisan, No More the Wasted Breed, 1982 ---, Another Raft, 1984 Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed, 1973
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Abubakar, Abdullahi S. (2009), ‘A New Concept of Actor/Audience Interaction and Audience Participation in Modern African Dramatic Theater: An Example of Osofisan’, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall), pp. 174-185. Onwueme, Tess (1991), ‘Visions of Myth in Nigerian Drama: Femi Osofisan versus Wole Soyinka’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.25, No. 1, pp. 58-69. Osofisan, F. (2001), ‘And After the Wasted Breed?’, in The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama and Culture, Trenton-Asmara, Africa World Press, 247-262. Soyinka, W. (1967), ‘The Writer in an African State’, Transition, No. 31, pp. 10-13.
Week 5: War
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 2007 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, 1985
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2008), ‘African “Authenticity” and the Biafran Experience’, Transition, 99, pp. 42-53. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, ‘Crafted Melange: Variations of Language in Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy’, in D. Wright (ed.), Contemporary African Fiction, Bayreuth African Studies 42, 1997, pp. 233-43. Uwasoba, Chijioke (2011), ‘War, Violence and Language in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy’, Neohelicon, 38 (2), pp. 487-498.
Week 6: Re/Imagining Africa
Buchi Emecheta, The Rape of Shavi, 1985 Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon, 2014
Okorafor, N. (2010), ‘Can You Define African Science Fiction?’ Pordzik, R. (2001), The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures, New York, Peter Lang, chapters 1 and 5.* Ten Kortenaar, Neil (2000), “Fictive States and the State of Fiction in Africa”, Comparative Literature 52.3, pp. 228-45.
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American Fiction Since 2000 Dr Rachel Malkin ([email protected])
This course explores the emergent concerns of the American fiction of the 2000s. As we consider what might be distinctive about recent novels, we will also examine the ways in which they negotiate the past and re-evaluate longer standing discourses. How have events of the 2000s affected literary writing? Is it useful to think about this period in terms of crisis? If contemporary fiction is haunted by a sense of aftermath, or ‘postness’, where are we situated now? What are the dominant moods and themes of this writing, and what visions of community and identity do these works present? What, if anything, do we still hope or expect that the novel, or literary writing more broadly, can do? While American intellectual and social contexts are important to these books, they also bear on wider discussions of the contemporary, and of fiction’s role. A further important frame for our thinking will be the importance of global or transnational contexts, as well as – or as opposed to – national ones. As well as identifying what these works share with one another and with critical projects, we will pay attention to their styles and formal aspects. There is a significant amount of primary reading for this course, so it will be helpful to focus on this in the first instance. Reading lists of theoretical and critical material are also provided. The following lists are not intended to be prescriptive or exclusive, and students are encouraged to pursue other directions if they prefer. It will be useful to think about your other reading in both American literature and contemporary literature when approaching these texts.
Week 1) Post 9/11 Contexts: Leila Halaby Once in a Promised Land (2007), Joseph O’Neill Netherland (2008)
Week 2) The Postsecular and Community: Marilynne Robinson Gilead (2004), Sandra Cisneros Caramelo (2002)
Week 3) Reading the Midwest: Ben Markovits: You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), Philip Meyer American Rust (2009)
Week 4) History and the ‘postracial’: Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad (2016), Paul Beatty The Sellout (2015)
Week 5): Genre’s Revenge: Junot Díaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)
Week 6): Here and There: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013), Jhumpa Lahiri Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
Further suggestions for primary reading: Paul Auster, Octavia Butler, Michael Chabon, Mark Z. Danielewski, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Moshin Hamid, Siri Hustvedt, Benjamin Kunkel, Chang Rae Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Ben Markovits, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Philip Roth, George Saunders, Gary Shtyengart, Jesmyn Ward, David Foster Wallace, Nell Zink, graphic novelists: Alison Bechdel, Hernandez brothers, Art Spielgelman, Chris Ware
Examples of 1990s/late 1980s fiction it might be helpful to look at: Raymond Carver Where I’m Calling From, Bret Eason Ellis Less Than Zero, American Psycho, James Ellroy LA Confidential, Louise Erdrich The Bingo Palace, Jonathan Franzen Strong Motion, Don DeLillo Underworld, Amy Hempel Tumble Home, Gish Jen Typical American, Chang Rae Lee Native Speaker, Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried, Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club, Toni Morrison
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Paradise, Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon, Sherman Alexie The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Rick Moody The Ice Storm, Philip Roth American Pastoral, David Foster Wallace Girl with Curious Hair, Infinite Jest, Karen Tei Yamashita Tropic of Orange, William Vollman Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs
(As will be obvious, some writers have published work in both the 1990s and the 2000s!)
Theoretical/sociological texts that may be useful for considering contemporary contexts: Sara Ahmad The Promise of Happiness (Duke UP, 2010), Queer Phenomenology (Duke UP, 2006)
Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)
Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski eds. Critique and Postcritique (Duke UP, 2017)
Talal Asad Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford UP, 2003)
Jean Baudrillard trans. Chris Turner The Spirit of Terrorism (Verso, 2013 ed)
Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP, 2010), The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton UP, 2001)
Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011)
Wendy Brown Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015)
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke UP, 2010)
Jonathan Crary 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013)
Colin Dayan The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton UP 2011)
Lee Edelman No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke UP, 2004)
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2014)
David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (OUP, 2007 ed)
Brian Massumi The Politics of Affect (Polity, 2015)
Philip Mirowski Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013)
WJT Mitchell What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (U of Chicago P, 2005)
Sianne Ngai Ugly Feelings (Harvard Up, 2005), and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard UP, 2012)
Jacques Rancière trans. Gabriel Rockhill The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Bloomsbury, 2013 ed)
Journals and forums:
Post-45 http://post45.research.yale.edu , C21: Journal of 21st century Writings http://www.gylphi.co.uk/journals/C21Literature/, American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies. Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly
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Concern, Avidly http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org, see also the posthumanities series of books at Minnesota UP, and the ‘New American Canon’ series at Iowa UP, for a sense of critical trends
Criticism/secondary reading:
Anthology which may provide a helpful general reference: American Literature in the World An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler eds. Wai Chee Dimock et al (Columbia UP, 2017)
Rachel Adams Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (U of Chicago P, 2009)
African American Review Special Issue Post-Soul Aesthetic: Essays on Contemporary African American Art 41.4, 2007
James Annesley Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel (Continuum, 2006)
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, trans. James Maraniss The Repeating Island: the Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Duke UP, 1997 ed)
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus “Surface Reading: An Introduction” Special Issue The Way We Read Now Representations 108:1, Fall 2009
Kirk Boyle and Dan Mrozowski eds. The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty- first Century Bust Culture (Lexington, 2013)
Peter Boxall Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2013)
Bill Brown Other Things (Chicago UP, 2015)
Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler eds. Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York UP, 2014 ed)
Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald eds. American Literature Special Issue Speculative Fictions 83.2, 2011
Cathy Caruth and Jonathan Culler eds. PMLA Special Issue Literary Criticism for the 21st Century 125.4, October 2010
Steven Connor ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge UP, 2004)
David Cowart Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (Cornell UP, 2006)
Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman eds. American Literature Special Issue After the Postsecular 86.4, 2014
David Glimp and Russ Castronovo, eds. ELN Special Issue After Critique 51.2, Fall/Winter 2013
Richard Gray After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley eds. American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh UP, 2008)
Andrew Hoberek, ed. Twentieth-Century Literature Special Issue After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary Fiction 53.3, 2007
Alex Houen ed. States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014)
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Heather Houser Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia UP, 2014)
Mitchum Huehls ‘The Post-Theory Theory Novel’, Contemporary Literature, 56.2, 2015
Amy Hungerford Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton UP, 2010), Making Literature Now (Stanford UP, 2016)
Gordon Hutner ed. American Literary History Special Issue The Second Book Project 25.1, 2013 (gives a sense of trends in the field of American literary studies over the last 15 years)
Postmodern/Postwar – and After eds. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, Daniel Worden (Iowa UP, 2016)
Daniel Grausam On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (U of Virginia P, 2011)
Caren Irr Toward the Geopolitical Novel: US Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2013)
David James and Andrzej Gąsiore eds. Contemporary Literature Special Issue Fiction since 2000: Postmillenial Commitments 53.4, Winter 2012
Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991 ed)
Brian Jarvis, Paul Jenner, Andrew Dix eds. The Contemporary American Novel in Context (Continuum 2011)
Kathy Knapp American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 (U of Iowa P, 2014)
Lee Konstantinou Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard UP, 2016)
Yoon Sun Lee Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (OUP, 2013)
Theodore Martin Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (Columbia UP, 2017)
Mark McGurl The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP, 2009)
Robert McLaughlin “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World” symploke 12.1-2, 2004
Ken Millard Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh UP, 2007)
Pankaj Mishra “Beyond the Global Novel” Financial Times, 27 September 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc0-00144feab7de.html
Modern Fiction Studies Special Issue Fiction after 9/11 57.3, Fall 2011
Ankhi Mukherjee What is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and the Invention of the Canon (Stanford UP, 2013)
Jeffrey Nealon Post-Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2012)
Alondra Nelson ed. Social Text Special Issue Afrofuturism 2.71, Summer 2002
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James Peacock and Tim Lustig eds. Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome (Routledge, 2013)
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman eds. The Futures of American Studies (Duke UP, 2002)
Aimee Pozorski Falling after 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Judith Ryan The Novel After Theory (Columbia UP, 2011)
Taiye Selasi ‘Bye Bye Babar’ March 2005 The Lip http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 and Emma Dabiri ‘Why I’m Not an Afropolitan’ Africa is a Country January 2014 http://africasacountry.com/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/
David Shields Reality Hunger: a Manifesto (Hamish Hamilton, 2010)
Zadie Smith “Two Directions for the Novel” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin, 2009)
Rachel Greenwald Smith Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge UP, 2015)
Daniel T. Rodgers Age of Fracture (Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2011)
David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers UP, 2015)
Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo eds. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Special Issue Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism 18.1, 2012
Eleanor Ty AsianFail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017)
Rebecca Walkowitz Born Translated: the Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Columbia UP, 2015)
Kenneth Warren What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2012)
Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney eds. Shopping in Space: Essays on American 'Blank Generation' Fiction (Grove Press, 1994)
Lee Zimmerman ed. Special Issue Postmodernism, Then Twentieth Century Literature 57:3-4, 2011
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Life Writing Dr Kate Kennedy ([email protected])
This option will be taught in Wolfson College in Hilary Term 2018.
The content of the course: The option examines life-writings (biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries) over a broad period; texts will be drawn mainly from literary life-writing and from the modern period, but students wishing to discuss examples from earlier periods or of Lives of non-literary figures will be able to do so, and students studying in any period of the Mst may take this option. The course will start with a broad discussion of the history, practices and strategies of the “life-writing” genre, and will look at five different approaches, with examples: family narratives, especially children writing about parents; women’s lives, especially autobiographies; diaries and letters, and how they are made use of in biography, especially in relation to memory and authenticity; the relationship between “life” and “work” in literary biography. All students will give at least one class presentation. Students will be able to write an essay on a topic of their choice which may go outside the selected texts for the seminars. There will be opportunities to discuss the choice of essay topics.
Course Plan:
The course will comprise four lectures and six seminars.
Weinrebe lecture series at Wolfson College on the theme of ‘Women’s Changing Lives’ (Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, four dates tbc in late January / February, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, 5:30-7pm)
Seminars:
Week 1. Introductory session on biography.
Week 2. Topic: The art of biography: comparative versions of biography.
Week 3. Topic: Autobiography
Week 4. Topic: Life-Writing genres - letters, diaries, journals, notebooks.
Week 5. Hermione Lee session, focussing on Henry James
Week 6. One short informal presentation each on essay-topics for course assessment. Optional preparatory reading: In the area of biography, it would be advantageous to have read one, or two, large-scale biographies of your own choice. Here are some possible examples of outstanding biographies in a huge field, in no special order: Jonathan Bate’s Unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes, Ruth Scurr’s life of John Aubrey, Benjamin Taylor’s short life of Proust, Claire Tomalin’s life of Pepys, Dickens or Hardy, Leon Edel’s
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one-volume version of his life of Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce, Jenny Uglow’s life of Elizabeth Gaskell, Hogarth, Bewick, or The Lunar Men, or her book on Sarah Losh’s church, The Pinecone, Richard Holmes’s life of Shelley or two-volume life of Coleridge, or his book on Romantic science and literature The Age of Wonder, Roy Foster’s two-volume life of W.B.Yeats, Judith Thurman’s life of Colette, James Simpson’s two books on a year in the life of Shakespeare, 1599 or 1606, Fiona MacCarthy’s life of Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf & The Servants, Alex Danchev’s Life of Cezanne, Stacy Schiff’s life of Cleopatra, Susie Harries’s life of Pevsner, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s life of D’Annunzio, The Pike, Lisa Cohen’s group biography of early 20th century women, All We Know, and Hermione Lee’s life of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton or Penelope Fitzgerald.
I. Selected Reading on Biography:
Altick, Richard, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America, Knopf, 1966
Backscheider, Paula, Reflections on Biography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999
Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot, Cape, 1984
Batchelor, John, ed, The Art of Literary Biography, Clarendon Press, 1995
Boswell, James, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. R.W.Chapman, Oxford World’s Classics Byatt, Antonia, Possession, Chatto & Windus, 1990
Clifford, James, Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1590-1960, Oxford University Press, 1962
Cubitt, Geoffrey, and Warren, Allen, Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, Manchester University Press, 2000
Donaldson, Ian, et al, Shaping Lives: Reflections on Biography, Australian National University Press, 1992
Edel, Leon, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia, Norton, 1984
Ellis, David, ed, Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, Pluto Press, 1993
Ellis, David, Literary Lives: biography and the search for understanding, Oxford, OUP, 2000
Empson, William, Using Biography, Chatto & Windus, 1984
Epstein, William H, ed, Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, Purdue University Press, 1991
Foster, Roy, W.B.Yeats, A Life, Vol I, “The Apprentice Mage: 1865-1914", (especially “Introduction”); Vol 2, “The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939", Oxford University Press, 1997, 2003
France, Peter, and St Clair, William, eds, Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2002
Gittings, Robert, The Nature of Biography, Heinemann, 1978
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Gould, Warwick, and Staley, Thomas, eds, Writing the Lives of Writers, Macmillan, 1998
Hamilton, Ian, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, Hutchinson, 1992, Pimlico, 1993
Heilbrun, Carolyn, Writing a Woman’s Life, 1988, Ballantyne Books, 1989
Holmes, Richard, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, Penguin, 1986, Flamingo, 1994; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, Hodder & Stoughton, 1993; Sidetracks, Hodder & Stoughton, 2000.
Holroyd, Michael, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, Little, Brown, 2002
Homberger, Eric, and Charmley John, eds, The Troubled Face of Biography, St Martin’s Press, 1988
James, Henry, The Aspern Papers, “The Real Right Thing”, “The Birthplace”, “The Death of the Lion” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed Leon Edel, Rupert Hart Davis, 1962-4 Johnson, Samuel, The Rambler, No 60 (On Biography), 13 October 1750; The Idler, No 84, 24 November 1759; The Life of Savage in Lives of the English Poets, Oxford University Press, 1977
Leader, Zachary, ed, On Life-Writing, Oxford University Press, 2015
Lee, Hermione, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009; Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing, Chatto & Windus, 2005; Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, 1996, Viking, 1997 [Chapter One].
Marcus, Laura, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Manchester University Press, 1994
Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman, 1994, Granta, 2005; Reading Chekhov, Granta, 2003; Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Yale, 2007
Maurois, André, Aspects of Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1929
Meyers, Jeffrey, ed, The Craft of Literary Biography, Macmillan, 1985; The Biographer’s Art: New Essays, Macmillan, 1989
Miller, Lucasta, The Brontë Myth, Vintage, 2002
Newey, Vincent, and Shaw, Philip, eds, Mortal Pages, Literary Lives, Scolar Press, 1996
Nicolson, Harold, The Development of English Biography, The Hogarth Press, 1928
O’Connor, Ulick, Biographers and the Art of Biography, Quartet Books, 1993
Salwak, Dale, ed, The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions, Macmillan, 1996
Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, Chatto & Windus, 1918
Woolf, Virginia, Orlando, 1928; Flush, 1933; “I am Christina Rossetti” (1930), “Walter Sickert” (1934); “The New Biography” (1927), “The Art of Biography” (1939). These essays can be found
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either in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed L.Woolf, Chatto & Windus, 1996-7, 4 Vols, or in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed A.McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 4 Vols, 1994 -.
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II. Selected Reading on Autobiography:
Students will probably want to make their own choices of autobiographies for discussion, but a few suggestions to read before the course might include: Virginia Woolf’s “Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Richard Wolheim’s Germs, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost, Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Philip Roth’s Patrimony and The Facts, Janet Frame’s An Angel at my Table, or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the 20th century, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996
Anderson, Linda, and Broughton, T.L., eds, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times, SUNY, 1997
Benstock, Sheri, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical
Writing, Routledge, 1988
Broughton, Trev Lynn, Men of Letters, Writing Lives, Routledge, 1999
Buckley, Jerome, Autobiography and the subjective impulse since 1800, Harvard UP, 1984
Cockshut, A.O.J., The Art of Autobiography in 19th and 20th century England, Yale UP, 1984
Danahay, Martin, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in
Nineteenth Century Britain, SUNY Press, 1994
De Man, Paul, “Autobiography as de-facement”, MLN, 94 (1979) 919-30. In Rhetoric of Romanticism, Yale UP, 1984
Eakin, Paul John, ed, The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, 2004
Fleishman, Avrom, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England, California UP, 1983
Gusdorf, George, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” in Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, Princeton UP, 1980
Jelinek, Estelle, Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, Indiana UP, 1980
LeJeune, Philippe, On Autobiography, ed.Eakins, P.J., trsl. Leary, K, Minnesota UP, 1989
Olney, James, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton UP, 1980
Peterson, Linda, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, Yale UP, 1986
Pilling, John, Autobiography and Imagination, Routledge, 1981
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century
England, Harvard UP, 1976
Stanley, Liz, The Auto/biographical I: the theory and practice of feminist autobiography, Manchester UP, 1992
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Treadwell, James, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783-1834, OUP, 2005
Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography, Methuen, 1982
Woolf, Virginia, “Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being, University of Sussex Press, 1986, rev. by Hermione Lee, Pimlico, 2002
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