Romantic Legacies - AAA132016
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OBJECTIVES
This course will trace the fictional, poetic and dramatic legacies of three major representatives of the second English Romantic generation, namely Keats, Byron, and Mary Shelley, in 20th- and 21st-century texts. In the first section, spanning 2 seminars, we will discuss two short novels about Keats – Anthony Burgess’s experimental text ABBA ABBA (1977), about Keats’s dying in Rome and the art of the sonnet, and the uses of metafiction, and Andrew Motion’s intriguing novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) in which the former Poet Laureate and Keats’s biographer imagines an alternative afterlife for the poet, discussing the ethos of Romantic legacy per se. The second section will trace Byronic legacies in drama, prose and poetry, starting with the 20th- and 21st-century legacy of one of the most innovative of Byron’s texts, the mock epic Don Juan (1819-1823). We will first look at Auden’s famous ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ from the autobiographical collection Letters from Iceland (1937), co-authored with Louis MacNeice. The second session will be on Burgess’ posthumously published verse novel Byrne (1995), which is written in ottava rima and Spenserians, focusing on 20th-century politics and adaptation of poetics. In the third session, we will explore a selection from the collected ottava rima poems A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times by Divers Hands (2014) and their take on Byron’s mock epic in view of 21st-century poetics and politics. By way of an interlude, we will then look at Virginia Woolf’s draft for an unrealised project, ‘Byron and Mr. Briggs’ (c. 1922), and the following two sessions will focus on Byronic prose legacies, where we will discuss Amanda Prantera’s novel Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 years after His Lordship's Death (1987) and Benjamin Markovits’ Imposture (on doppelgangers, celebrity and John Polidori), the first part of his 2007-11 Byronic trilogy. In the final section of the seminar, devoted to Mary Shelley, we will discuss three text bearing on the summer of 1816 and beyond, starting with Howard Brenton’s 1984 critically acclaimed play Bloody Poetry which traces the 1816 Shelley-Byron party to its bitter ends. Next will be the legacies of Shelley’s debut novel Frankenstein (1818), namely Liz Lochhead’s award-winning drama Blood and Ice (1982) and Jeanette Winterson’s playful fictional reimagining Frankissstein (2019). CREDIT REQUIREMENTS & ASSESSMENT: regular class attendance and active participation in seminar discussion 1 short in-class presentation (10 mins, ppt) final essay (2000 words) whose outline has to be discussed with the course instructor The syllabus for this course will run as follows. Most of the texts can be comfortably read in a week, though you should try to read Markovits’ Imposture and Winterson’s Frankisstein in advance. For the poetry part of our seminar (beginning Week 4), and Byrne especially, please read the first canto of Byron’s Don Juan, which is available on Moodle, to better grasp the intricacies of ottava rima and its contemporary adaptations that we will be looking at. See you soon! PRIMARY TEXTS: Virginia Woolf, ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’ (Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. III, 1919-1934) W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936) Anthony Burgess, ABBA ABBA (1977) Liz Lochhead, Blood and Ice (1982) Howard Brenton, Bloody Poetry (1984) Amanda Prantera, Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 years after His Lordship's Death (1987) Anthony Burgess, Byrne (1995) Andrew Motion, The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) Benjamin Markovits, Imposture (2007) A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times by Divers Hands (2014) Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019) See the Moodle link above for the current syllabus. Poslední úprava: Horová Miroslava, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.02.2025)
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