Course module - Lord Byron

Code : ENGL33021
Credit rating: 20
Semester : 1

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Aims | Objectives | Assessment | Information | Course Content |
Course Materials | Tutors | Timetable | Teaching Methods | Keywords

Aims

• To introduce students to a range of widely-influential poetic texts by Byron;


• To foster an understanding of Byron’s central thematic preoccupations and his exploration of these across his writing career;


• To develop students’ appreciation of Byron’s formal inventiveness, and the motives for this, across a range of poetic forms and genres;


• To introduce students to Byron’s significance in British/European culture in the nineteenth century;


• To introduce students to some of the controversies and critical debates that have surrounded Byron’s life and work since the publication of his earliest poems.

Objectives (Learning Outcomes)

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge and understanding of key poetic texts by Byron;


• Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of Byron’s career and development as a writer;


• Demonstrate an awareness of Byron’s wider cultural impact, reception and significance;


• Critically engage with both Byron’s poetic explorations of various key issues and other readers’ assessments of these;


• Demonstrate skill in the close reading of poetry;


• Competently and confidently present, both verbally and in writing, the results of the close-reading of Byron’s texts;


• Engage with and contribute to the critical debate concerning Byron’s work;


• The ability to engage thoughtfully and critically with a variety of texts, as well as with a range of ideas about these texts;
  
• Skilfully construct arguments, both verbally and in written form, supporting and clearly explaining these through illustration and the analysis of evidence;
  
• Show research and communication skills (both verbally and in writing) appropriate to Level 3 degree work that will form part of their final degree assessment.

  • Assessment

    One 3,000-word essay (50%); one 2-hour unseen written exam (50%)
    
    The use of dictionaries in the examination is prohibited. This rule applies to all categories of students, including all Visiting Students.

    Information

    
    

    THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE AS FREE-CHOICE.

    Course Content

    Lord Byron was the pre-eminent European writer of his time, and one of the most influential literary figures of the nineteenth century. He is an icon of the Romantic age. This course offers students the opportunity to study Byron’s key works in depth and detail, in the contexts of both their historical/literary impact and their later scholarly reception. The course will follow Byron’s development as a writer from the convention-breaking first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through to Byron’s comic recasting of epic tradition in Don Juan. It will trace the evolution of the Byronic Hero (from exile to rebel, murderer and proto-vampire), Byron’s radical modernising of a range of narrative, lyric and dramatic forms, and his exploration of themes such as the Promethean defiance of authority, liberty and libertinism, gender, sexual transgression, predestination and the nature of sin. The course will also scrutinise Byron’s poetic responses to, and representations of, contemporary historical events, travel (particularly to Greece, Switzerland and Italy) and personal scandal – as well as his own debauchery, international celebrity and exile – and his construction (through these) of the still powerful, charismatic, cosmopolitan, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Byronic persona.

    Course Materials

    Tutor(s)

    Rawes, Dr Alan
    

    Timetable

    PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE FOR 2013-2014
    
    Group1: Thursday, 2.00-5.00
    Group 2: Tuesday, 2.00-5.00

    Teaching Methods

    3- hour seminar

    Preliminary reading

    Primary Texts:
    
    Jerome McGann (ed.), Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press1986)
    Peter Manning and Susan Wolfson (eds), Lord Byron: Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996)
    
    Selected Secondary Reading:
    
    Bernard Beatty and Robert Gleckner (eds), The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)
    Bernard Beatty, Byron’s Don Juan (London: Crom Helm, 1985)
    Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
    Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004)
    Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
    Alan Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
    Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970)
    Jane Stabler (ed.), Byron Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
    Fiona Wilson (ed.), Byromania (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

    Keywords

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