Undergraduate Course: The Reign of Terror: Fear and Loathing in Romantic Literature (ENLI10315)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to different concepts and discourses of terror in romantic period literature. It concentrates mainly on the relationship between aesthetic theories of the sublime and the political climate of fear created by the Reign of Terror in France in the mid-1790s and intensified by the revolutionary wars in Europe. The course explores how ideas and perceptions of terror fed into romantic literature, and how romantic literature in turn helped to reshape notions of fear. |
| Course description |
Through reading primary texts, students will develop an enhanced understanding of the connections between the romantic language of terror and other topics, including millenarianism, anti-Jacobinism, spectatorship, codes of visuality, obscenity, prophecy, pantheism, materiality, subjectivity, friendship, domesticity, the Gothic, 'atrocity,' the body, imagination, gender, and liminality. The course will begin with an introductory session outlining the main themes and writers on the course, and close with a seminar addressing the relevance of notions of terror and the sublime to (post)modern culture and society.
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge of the cultural significance of literature 1789-1832
- Demonstrate knowledge of the historical origins and constructions of the notions of terror and the sublime 1789-1832
- Demonstrate knowledge of the historical and theoretical relationships between images and texts in relation to the Romantic period 1789-1832
- Demonstrate knowledge of key cultural and political ideas in relation to the Romantic period 1789-1832
- Demonstrate an ability to make arguments about the literature and culture of the Romantic period 1789-1832 in relation to modern scholarship and criticism
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Reading List
The Sublime Spectacle: Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790, excerpts) and Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759)
Apocalypse Now: Blake, The visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and America: A Prophecy (1793)
Perils of Consciousness: Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805, excerpts)
Fears in Solitude: Coleridge, 'Frost at Midnight'; 'France: An Ode'; 'Fears in Solitude' (1798); Lamb, 'Witches, and Other Night Fears' (1821)
Gothic Terror: Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
The Revolting Body: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
The Material Sublime: Percy Shelley, 'Ode to The West Wind'; 'Ozymandais'; 'England in 1819'; 'The Triumph of Life' (1822)
Gothic Horror: Lewis, The Monk (1795)
The Postmodern Sublime: Lyotard, 'Postscript to Terror and the Sublime' (1985); Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) (excerpts); Slavoj 'i'ek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) (excerpts)
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Tim Milnes
Tel: (0131 6)50 3615
Email: tim.milnes@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: pgordysh@ed.ac.uk |
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