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Revival and Return: Using the Past from Pope to Keats

Module description

This module will provide an introduction to eighteenth-century (and early nineteenth-century) literature and culture, focusing on the reception of ancient, medieval, and renaissance culture.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The long eighteenth century was a period of rapid change and innovation, but was also an age in which writers, artists, scholars and architects increasingly defined themselves in relation to the past. Indeed, many of the fiercest intellectual and political disputes of the period centred on differing interpretations of history. Neoclassical authors went to ancient Rome for literary models, while revolutionary thinkers looked to it for republican virtues. Reviving interest in medieval Europe inspired Gothic novels, and a myth of ancient Britain helped to create new conceptions of poetry. This module will provide an introduction to eighteenth-century (and early nineteenth-century) literature and culture, focusing on the reception of ancient, medieval, and renaissance culture. It will involve detailed study of work by canonical authors such as Pope, Johnson, Walpole, Goldsmith, Coleridge and Keats, as well as less well known figures.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate advanced critical knowledge and understanding of the uses of the past in eighteenth-century English culture
• 2. Demonstrate an advanced appreciation of modern theoretical debates surrounding the interpretation of these issues
• 3. Demonstrate an advanced capacity to identify the complex relations between artistic production and the social, economic, political and cultural developments of the period
• 4. Demonstrate an intellectually sophisticated ability to apply this knowledge to the analysis of eighteenth-century texts

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Demonstrate an intellectually sophisticated ability to analyse the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, and to relate its concerns and modes of expression to its historical context
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced and autonomous ability to relate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline to wider issues of cultural and intellectual history
• 7. An advanced and autonomous ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts
• 8. Demonstrate an advanced and precise ability to work from the detail of literary texts, with a full appreciation of their formal aspects
• 9. Demonstrate an advanced ability to digest, select, and organise interdisciplinary material and to trace the development of debate across disciplinary boundaries

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 10. Through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to articulate their views convincingly both individually and in groups
• 11. Through essay-writing, demonstrate advanced research and bibliographic skills, an advanced and intellectually mature capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument and to write clear and correct prose
• 12. Through research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate an advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis
• 13. Through research, seminar discussion, and essay writing demonstrate an advanced and intellectually mature capacity to question assumptions, to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to critically reflect on their own learning process
• 14. Through responses to constructive feedback, demonstrate an advanced and intellectually mature ability to reflect upon and strengthen written and other work

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Introduction: The Goths and the Classics
• The Grand Tour
• Graphic Satire in the Eighteenth Century: William Hogarth and James Gillray
• Oliver Goldsmith and the Biblical Past
• The Search for Origins
• The Invention of Shakespeare
• Questions of Forgery: Chatterton and Macpherson
• The Gothic Past: The Castle of Otranto
• Romantic Medievalism I: Tales and Romances
• Classical, Orientalist, and Gothic Landscapes
• Romantic Medievalism II: Radical Gothic

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 50%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of referral will be capped at 50%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Core Reading:

• Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. by Arthur Friedman and Robert L. Mack (Oxford, 2006)
• Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford, 1984)
• Jerome C McGann (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Romantic period Verse (Oxford, 1993)
• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. by Michael Gamer (London, 2001)

Secondary Reading:

• Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Ideal of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1997)
• Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (2010)
• Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, The Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2009)
• Damien Walford Davies (ed), Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (Routledge, 2009)
• Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660 1769 (Oxford, 1992)
• Nick Groom, ed, Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (OUP 1999)
• Nick Groom (ed), Narratives of Forgery, Angelaki 1:2 (Winter 1993-94)
• Nick Groom, The making of Percy's Reliques (Oxford, 1999)
• Nick Groom, Romantic Poetry and Antiquity, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35-52.
• John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1976).
• Anne Janowitz, England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Basil Blackwell, 1990)
• Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Chicago, 1991).
• Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Hambledon and London, 2004)
• James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict 1764 1832 (CUP, 2006)
• Howard Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2644

Key words search

Eighteenth century, neoclassical, medievalism, gothic