|
Instructors: Dr. Wolfgang Funk
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.410
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 32
Registration group: BS/ELC 410
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
In this course, we will explore the work of a number of famous and not so famous female poets from the 19th century and in doing so will cover the literary periods from Romanticism (Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams) to Aestheticism (Amy Levy, ‘Michael Field’, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge). In this context, a strong focus will be on rethinking what is commonly conceived of as the ‘canon’ of Victorian poetry, a body of work which is still very often thought of as predominantly male (Tennyson, R. Browning, D.G. Rossetti, Wilde).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s seminal long poem Aurora Leigh will be one of the key texts in discussing conceptions of female (poetic) authorship, while other thematic aspects of the seminar will include the relationship of women (poets) and nature, the role of religion in poetry as well as the influence of Darwinian notions of evolution on the development of a gendered poetic voice in the second half of the 19th century.
Required Reading:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh and other Poems. Penguin Classics, 1995.
If you already own another edition of Aurora Leigh, this will also do.
The poems to be discussed as well as a few introductory theoretical texts plus a preliminary course outline will be made available via the JGU Reader round the beginning of October.
Recommended (Background) Reading:
- Armstrong, Isobel, and Virginia Blain, eds. Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900. New York: Macmillan, 1999.
- Hickok, Kathleen. Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women's Poetry. Westport, CN/London: Greenwood Press, 1984.
- Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart. Charlottesville, VI/London: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
- Moine, Fabienne. Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Farnham/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.
If you want to do some systematic preliminary reading, you will find more poems than you can shake a stick it in either of these anthologies:
- Armstrong, Isobel, and Joseph Bristow, eds. Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
- Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, eds. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995.
|
