ENGL 730: Romanticism and Visual Culture 'Awesome combinations of failure, difference, distance, lag, divergence, and conflict establish the relations of texts and images in the Romantic period' according to Morris Eaves. This course will examine some of those relations and the tensions they create between visual and literary culture. But while accounts such as Eaves's tend to represent these relations as paragonal or antagonistic, this course will also explore collaborations and potential synergies between word and image in this period. To do so, we will examine ways in which literary and visual arts each thematise the other, and ways in which they circulate alongside each other in the period's complex media ecology. Possible topics include: illuminated books, illustrated editions, statues and memorials (and poems about them), popular visual entertainments such as the panorama and the diorama, galleries and display, early photography, ekphrasis. ENGL 331: Literature of the Romantic Period I This course will introduce students to a selection of English literature from the earlier Romantic period. It will include writers who have historically been central to the study of this period, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, writers who, while consistently studied, have remained marginal, such as Jane Austen and George Crabbe, and writers who have only recently started to make an impact on our understanding of the period, such as Mary Robinson and Anna Barbauld. While paying attention to the artistic craftsmanship of the writers we study, we will also place them in the historical context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and think about what links their period and their concerns with our own. ENGL 332: Literature of the Romantic Period II This course will introduce students to a selection of English literature from the later Romantic period. It will include writers who have historically been central to the study of this period (Byron, Shelley, Keats), writers who, while consistently studied, have remained marginal (Hazlitt, De Quincey, Hunt) and writers who have recently started to make an impact on our understanding of the period (Landon, Hemans, Clare). The course will include poetry, drama, novels and non-fiction prose. It will introduce students to such important Romantic themes as Landscape, Tourism, Inspiration, Memory, the Common Man, Orientalism, Medievalism, the City and the Sublime. While paying attention to the artistic craftsmanship of the writers we study, we will also place them in the historical context of the early nineteenth century, and think about what links their period and their concerns with our own. While it is not required, an understanding of poetics such as that gained in ENGL 311 is recommended, as is some experience of studying literature written before 1800. ENGL 346: Sociology and Materiality of Texts This course is dedicated to exploring the material conditions out of which texts emerge, and in which they make their impact. It will scrutinize the contingencies of production, promotion, distribution, circulation and reception that help to shape the meanings of texts, and the ways in which those contingencies may be either thematized or effaced. It will consider ways in which meaning can be located not only in the words of a poem, but also in the physicality of the book, or newspaper, or parchment, or papyrus, or web page in which it appears. And it will examine tensions between the author's intentions, the publisher's interests, the reviewer's agenda and the reader's pleasures, which result in the production of texts whose ontology is complex and layered. Beginning with such pioneers as W. W. Greg, D. F. Mackenzie and Roger Chartier, it will explore what Jerome McGann has called "the textual condition" in order to help students develop a more sophisticated understanding of what texts are and do. ENGL 533: Romantic & Victorian Celebrity Culture Celebrity culture does not want to be understood. It functions best when consumers remain mystified by it, attributing a celebrity's success to his or her magical star quality. We live in a culture obsessed by celebrities, but very few people have studied the history of celebrity culture, or theorized its significance. This course will explore the idea that there were celebrities before film. It will include figures such as Laurence Sterne, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, Ann Yearsley, Letitia Landon, Henry James and Oscar Wilde. It will also include the media, genres and technologies that sustained celebrity, such as the book review, the biographical sketch, the interview, the gossip column, the steel-plate engraving and the photograph. ENGL 535: Byron, Shelley, and the Book This course will study the works of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, paying special attention to the books in which those works have been published. Drawing on the treasures of the university's Rare Books and Special Collections Division, the course will introduce students to bibliographic methods of analysis designed to inform critical readings of Byron's and Shelley's major poems. Topics may include: the publication histories of individual works, the relationship of both poets to their publishers, piracies, unauthorised circulation and international reprinting, and the posthumous construction of the poets' oeuvres through editorial practices and collected editions (including Mary Shelley's posthumous stewardship of her husband's works). Throughout, our focus will be on exploring the material history of these authors' works as a way to develop more sophisticated and contextualised readings of those works. ENGL 730: Romanticism & its Critics This course will enable students to broaden and deepen their understanding of English literature from the Romantic Period (1780-1830). It will provide an overview of the major critical approaches to this body of work, such as historicism, feminism, neo-formalism, postcolonialism and book history. By assigning literary texts from the Romantic period alongside some seminal critical writing of the last twenty years, this course will introduce students to the ongoing scholarly and methodological debates surrounding the academic study of Romanticism. Students will be encouraged to compare different critical approaches, evaluate the insights that those approaches make possible, and situate themselves within the current debate. ENGL 404: Intersections of Literary & Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century Historically, critics have been reluctant to consider texts and images as part of a single field of enquiry. David Piper began his study of poets' portraits by admitting that "[t]he subject lies on the periphery of literature" and expressing his concern that it would appear "noxiously distracting". Such anxieties may be the legacy of a "fear of [...] visual images" that William Galperin identifies as "endemic to romantic poetics", and the product of the post-Romantic arrangement of academic disciplines. More recently, however, literary critics and art historians have been more willing to cross disciplinary boundaries and map out connections between verbal and visual texts. This course will feature a number of examples of intersections between literary and visual culture in the nineteenth century, and will encourage students to consider the theoretical and methodological implications of studying these meeting points.