Rakes to Romantics

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• a range of eighteenth-century fictional, poetic, and other texts
• a range of recent and historical critical approaches to eighteenth-century literature, and their cultural contexts
• the interrelationship of literary production, its reception and wider historical context

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• use internet resources effectively as part of historical research
• work in teams or pairs on specific set tasks
• present your research findings confidently to the group

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• investigate, research and structure arguments around the particular themes and concerns of a vexed historical epoch
• analyse and comment in detail on poetry, drama, essays, novels and philosophical texts

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• make connections between fictional and discursive writings of different genres
• the relationships between long eighteenth-century literary modes and genres such as epistolary and, Gothic fiction; neoclassical and Romantic poetic forms; drama; and non-fiction.
• question whether there are common historical or formal descriptors for the ‘long eighteenth century’.

The module moves chronologically from Restoration libertinism to Gothic fiction of the 1790s and to another famous libertine, Lord Byron. You will study texts in drama, poetry and fiction (Please note that texts may change from year to year):

1.George Etherege, The Man of Mode, William Wycherley, The Country Wife

2.Thomas Shadwell: The Libertine, Aphra Behn: The Rover

3.John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Poems

4.Seduction Narratives: Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse, and Elizabeth Rowe, Letters Moral and Entertaining

5.Matthew Lewis, The Monk

6.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

7.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

8.Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

9.John Keats, Poems, 1820

10.Lord Byron, Don Juan

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include

• Lectures
• Seminars
• Office hours for individual feedback on essays

Learning activities include

• Office hours for individual feedback on essays
• Experience of organizing and running a seminar
• Individual study and research
• Accessing and evaluating online resources

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible weekly contact hour, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Resources & Reading list

Internet Resources

British Periodicals Index.

British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies website.

The 18th Century Commons.

British Association for Romantic Studies Website.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (from the Historical Texts database).

https://library.soton.ac.uk/english.

Poetry and reviews.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External