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Victorian Poetry 1837-1901

 Syllabus

 

TTh 2:30-3:45 p. m.

Instructor: Florence Boos, 319 EPB; office phone 335-0434 (answering machine),

home 338-4383 (until midnight);e-mail florence-boos@uiowa.edu.

 

Textbooks ordered for Course at IMU:

Broadview Shorter Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas Collins and Vivienne Rundle

handouts for working-class poets, Hamilton and Laycock

 

We have a class web page, at http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/Vpoetry, and our

Victoria's secret is our password [ ]. At least once each week, before 12 noon on the day of

class, please vist our site, enter the "message" window through the password,

and write a commentary on one of the readings for class. I will read and in some cases

print them out each day before class to use as a basis for part of the

day's discussion. They will show on a "noticeboard," so you can read and

respond to each other's comments.

August 28th Introduction, metrics

August 30th Some background on the period; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "The Cry of the Children"

 

September 4th EBB, "Runaway Slave at Pilgrims Point"

September 6th Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi"

 

September 11th Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"

September 13th D. G. Rossetti, "Jenny"

 

September 19th Augusta Webster, "The Castaway"

September 21st Pre-Raphaelite slides

 

September 25th Tennyson, "Ulysses," "The Lotus Eaters"

September 27th session on library resources; "The Lady of Shalott"

 

October 2nd Tennyson, "In Memoriam"

October 4th Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"

 

October 9th William Morris, "The Defence of Guenevere"

October 11th slides, Pre-Raphaelite and William Morris and the decorative arts

 

October 16th -----

October 18th Special Collections

 

October 23rd working-class and dialect poets: Hamilton and Laycock

October 25th Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" assignment

 

October 30th Arnold, "A Summer Night," Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"

November 1st Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire"

 

November 6th Hopkins, "Binsey Poplars," "Spring and Fall," "No Worst There Is None," "Carrion Comfort"

November 8th Swinburne, "The Triumph of Time," "The Lake of Gaube"

 

November 13th Amy Levy, "Xantippe"

November 15th Mary Coleridge, "The Other Side of the Mirror," "The Wild

Women"

 

November 20th Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

 

November 27th -----

 

December 4th Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson, "The Dark Angel," Michael Field, selections

December 6th Thomas Hardy, "Drummer Hodge," "The Convergence of the Twain," "Channel Firing," "In Time of the Breaking of Nations"; brief discussion of poetic modernism

If time permits: A. E. Housman, Alice Meynell

 

In addition to posting weekly questions to our 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). The research paper is due November 15th and the take-home final during exam week. In place of a written final examination, you will be asked to briefly summarize the contents of your take-home final to the class.

 

 

 


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