Female Romantics - Proseminar

The Zoom-seminar invites you to have a closer look at the writings of female authors of the Romantic period. While, until very recently, literary history has focused almost exclusively on the so-called Big Six –the male poets William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron – the years between 1789 and 1837 in fact proved to be a watershed moment for British women’s writing. Moreover, the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and others often serve as a (critical) commentary upon dominant male modes of Romanticism, thus offering not only perspectives upon the period as such, but they also discuss contemporary social and cultural issues. In this seminar, we will read prose fiction, poetry, and drama by female authors including Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans.

Please buy a copy of and read:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: OUP. (= Oxford World Classics)

AND

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Ed. D.L. Macdonald; Kathleen Scherf, et.al. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Don’t use any other editions!

Further texts will be made available upon the start of term.

Introductory reading:

Ralf Haekel (ed.), Handbook of British Romanticism. Berlin & New York: DeGruyter, 2017.