We will spend several weeks on works of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Rosamund Marriott Watson and the pseudonymous couple who wrote under the name “Michael Field,” then turn to a selection of lesser-known but equally significant writers of songs, ballads, folk poems and other forms of working-class "popular poetry."
I will ask each student to prepare an introductory class-presentation on one of the course’s lesser-known poets, from a list which may include (but not be restricted to) Laetitia Landon, Emily Bronte, Eliza Cook, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Jean Ingelow, Annie Matheson, Olive Custance, Alice Meynell, Caroline Norton, Emily Pfeiffer, Mary Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Janet Hamilton and Ellen Johnston.
Syllabus
August 24th Monday Introduction
course content, metrics
August 26th Wednesday
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: her life, Aurora Leigh, book I
August 31st Monday
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, books II and III
September 2nd Wednesday
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, book IV and V
September 7th Monday
Labor Day
September 9th Wednesday
Aurora Leigh, books VI and VII
September 14th Monday
Aurora Leigh, books VIII and IX
September 16th Wednesday
Aurora Leigh, final discussion
September 25th Tuesday
finish Auora Leigh, final discussion
September 27th Thursday
Augusta Webster, "The Castaway"
October 2nd Tuesday
popular literature: women's ballads
October 4th Thursday
working-class literature: Janet Hamilton and Ellen Johnston
October 9th Tuesday
popular literature: Eliza Cook
October 11th Thursday
instructor will be away at a conference; students should use the time to plan their research paper
October 16th Tuesday
title of research paper and 8 item bibliography due; should include articles, books and other reference materials
Christina Rossetti
October 18th Thursday
Christina Rossetti
October 23rd Tuesday
Christina Rossetti
outline or first draft due
October 25th Thursday
research paper due
Amy Levy
October 30th Tuesday
Michael Field
You should start to choose the poet for your special presentation.
November 1st Thursday
student led classes: each student will choose an author and poem to present. We'll try to stick to a schedule of 4 poems/students per class.
Suggested poets include: *Toru Dutt, *Alice Meynell, Edith Nesbit, *Mary Coleridge, Jean Ingelow, May Kendall, George Eliot, *Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Dora Greenwell, Violet Fane, Mathilde Blind, Emily Pfeiffer, Agnes Robinson, Dollie Radford.
Others may be found in Victorian Women Poets, ed. Leighton and Reynolds, and Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Armstrong and Bristow.
November 6th Tuesday
student choices of poet
November 8th Thursday
student choices of poet
November 13th Tuesday
student choices of poet
November 15th Thursday
student choices of poet
November 20th and 22nd Thanksgiving break
student choices of poet
November 27th Tuesday AM
student choices of poet
November 29th Thursday
student choices of poet
December 4th Tuesday
poets of the fin de siecle
December 6th Thursday
Rosamund Marriott Watson
December 11th
Charlotte Mew
December 13th
Charlotte Mew, final discussion
December 18th final reports on take-home examination
Assignments
MW 3:55-5:10 p. m., Room 104 EPB
Instructor: Florence Boos florence-boos@uiowa.edu
http://english.uiowa.edu/courses/boos/wpoe09
Office: 319 EPB, office phone 335-0434 (answering machine)
Office hours: most afternoons after class; Wednesday 7:30-8:30 p. m.; Friday 3-4 p. m.
Textbooks at UI Bookstore:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Norton Critical Edition
Victorian Women Poets: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Virginia Blain
corsepack, at Zephyrs Copy Center, Washington Street.
Three additional anthologies have been placed on library reserve.
Course Requirements:
1. contributions to class discussion: please read the assignment before class and come prepared to ask questions and comments on unusual features of the text.
From time to time, I will ask students to give a brief class presentation on an author's life, and/or to prepare responses and questions for our readings.
2. journal/reading responses: please prepare 6 reading responses, the equivalent of two double-spaced typed pages each, to be posted on Icon so that your fellow students may read them. Four of your responses should be on course readings, and two on literary criticism about Victorian women poets. For this latter, I will give you a short bibliography of suggested readings.
3. In addition to posting these responses to the class web site, you will be asked to write a six page critical/research paper, and a six page final take-home examination.
Your critical/research paper must be based on research in the biographies, book-length critical studies, and critical articles on the author you have chosen (that is, you cannot merely use web-page citations). It is due November 11th.
4. The final essay/take-home exam will be a comparative critical discussion of the works of two or more poets you have read during the course.
The final will be held during examination week, most likely on Monday December 14th, 2009 unless students vote for another day that week.
5. You will be asked to provide for the class a brief biography of a poet of your choice, and to lead an approx. 20 minute class discussion of one of her poems.
8:121 Victorian Poetry, Final Paper/Exam:
To be handed in at our final session, probably held Tuesday December 16th, 2008 at 5:30 p. m.
You should write a six page essay contrasting some aspect of the works of two poets we have studied to show how they represent an important feature of Victorian poetic culture or sensibility, or alternately, different aspects of Victorian poetic taste. If the poets you discuss are from different periods, you should consider whether their different choices reflect shifts in Victorian poetic taste as the century progressed. Your essay, in other words, should comment not only on the poems themselves but how they express thematic concerns or stylistic tastes of their respective periods.
Your essay should include comments on formal features of the poetry you discuss: style, stanzaic form, rhythm, meter and diction.
Poets we have studied have included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Augusta Webster, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, Dante G. Rossetti, William Morris, working-class poets Eliza Cook, Janet Hamilton, Samuel Laycock and W. J. Linton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Michael Field (Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley), Lionel Johnson, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats and Charlotte Mew.
Topics you might consider for contrast include:
use of imagery, symbols and allegory
use of landscape; themes of nature and the environment
issues of gender/race/sexuality/crime
religious imagery/revisionist uses of faith
issues of belief and doubt/absence of belief
introspection, the divided or alienated self
the oppressions of convention
myth and legend (e. g. Arthurian legend, classical mythology)
fallenness/“original sin”/divided or alienated selves
the possibility of romantic love
issues of fate/social determination
war and conflict
the uses of music/art/history
the meaning of death
evocation of regional differences
parents and children
uses of the dramatic monologue
patterns of the lyric
social hierarchy/issues of class and marginalization
Victorian sonnets (EBB, Christina and D. G. Rossetti, Webster, Field)
the meditative sequence/Victorian narrative poetry
redemption/human fellowship/alternative societies or ideals
the nature of beauty; the nature of morality