Nineteenth-Century British Literature

M 08-26

First day! Anna Barbauld, The Mouse’s Petition and The Caterpillar

• First, create a Hypothes.is account for online annotations, with your pitt userid.
• Then, join our class’s Hypothes.is annotation group
• Set up Hypothes.is to run in your preferred browser, following the instructions. There is an extension in Google Chrome, or a “bookmarklet” for other browsers.
• Begin annotating the assigned reading for next class. Turn on hypothes.is in your browser window, and change your group setting (at the top of the Hypothes.is panel) from Public to our class annotation group, 2019-UPG-19cBrit, so you will be part of our class conversation.
• Annotations on passages can raise questions, provide information, point to related resources with links, provide illustrations, and be replied to by me and your peers. We will start a running informative conversation in the margins of our readings this semester.

• Look up definitions of words first in the Oxford English Dictionary (via the Pitt Digital Library Database login). Choose what strikes you as the best-fitting definition for an interesting word, and then also be sure to explain how the word fits in the context of the larger phrase: Why does this word fit here, or what significance does it seem to have in context with the language in the poem at this point?
• Try looking up unusual phrases in the Credo Reference (Pitt Digital Library database) or with a Google Search, or in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. As with definitions, in your annotation, describe what strikes you as the best explanation for a phrase, and explain how it fits in context with the passage in the poem of which it is part.
• Look for images or multimedia that help illuminate a phenomenon being described verbally, and provide some explanation and context (link to their source on the web if you can).

W 08-28

Anna Barbauld, The Caterpillar, and Washing Day

F 08-30

• On the top right, set G for gallery mode.
• In the white-on-black menu below the Blake plate, select Diplomatic Transcription, to help us read Blake's text and make annotations.
• In the grey menu bar, you can Objects from the Same Matrix to see how this print compares to other printings Blake made of the same plate. Or look at Objects in Copy to see all the plates in the Copy L.

How did Blake create his plates? Read William Blake Prints and watch the eight-minute video at the end.

M 09-02

W 09-04

F 09-06

• web: Robert Southey, Poems on the Slave Trade,
• web: Images of Little Black Boys in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

M 09-09

• French Revolution—Apocalyptic Expectations: Overview and excerpts from Joseph Priestley and William Blake.
• William Blake: The Grey Monk through Auguries of Innocence: (Pickering MS 12 through 18 (select Diplomatic Transcription to read the transcription of these 6 pages from Blake's manuscript notebook).

W 09-11

Robert Southey, Wat Tyler: Introduction and Act I, and A Brief Publication History of Wat Tyler

Assign Digital Sound/Video Interpretation I in Canvas.

F 09-13

M 09-16

W 09-18

• Background on the Sublime, Beautiful, and Picturesque
• Charlotte Turner Smith, Elegaic Sonnets:
  • Sonnets I to VIII
  • Sonnets XLIII to LIX

F 09-20

• Charlotte Smith, The Swallow
• S. T. Coleridge, The Eolian Harp
• Listen:
  • an Aeolian window harp
  • More Aeolian harps
  • Frederic Chopin’s Op. 25 No. 1 Aeolian Harp (1836)

M 09-23

• Traditional oral/aural forms revived: the Ballad:
  • Sir Patrick Spens
  • The Dæmon-lover (This gives a history of adaptations, so just skim through that. Scroll down to read the ballad in its variety of forms)
  • Barbara Allen and listen to Altan and Dolly Parton sing it in Irish and English
  • Lord Randall
• Mary Robinson’s adaptation of the ballad: The Haunted Beach
• Trailer for Songcatcher

W 09-25

F 09-27

• History of Feminism in 20 minutes: full slideset
• Wollstonecraft discussion, continued.
• Distribute and start Midterm Exam 1

M 09-30

• Lyrical Ballads (1798): Advertisement and first version of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts
• Look at the book view Rime as published in Sibylline Leaves (1817)
• Read / annotate this edition of the 1817 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

W 10-02

• Continue discussion The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Kubla Khan

F 10-04

M 10-07

• We Are Seven, Anecdote for Fathers, Lines (Written at a small distance from my house)
• Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman and Lines Written in Early Spring
• The Idiot Boy, Love, and The Mad Mother

W 10-09

• Define and explain uses of interesting / unfamiliar words and references.
• Try to boil down complex stretches of language in this Preface in your own words more simply: or raise questions about particularly difficult passages: what questions do these passages raise for you?
• What passages indicate positive and negative qualities of poetry (what makes for good vs. bad poems, according to WW)? Highlight and comment on these.
• Note where WW uses language from the sciences to describe the ideal Poet or the act of writing poetry.
• Note what specific capacities and experiences WW claims poets need to have. How are poets different from other people, according to WW?
• Note what kinds of people poets should be connecting with, and how they make a connection.

F 10-11

• Wordsworth, Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey
• Work in progress and collaboration: The Daffodils (drafted between 1804 and 1807, first published in William Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes):
  • Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry
  • Manuscript draft of the poem
  • An account of the collaboration and 1815 published version

Introduce Annotation and Research Assignment

M 10-14

• Lord Byron, Prometheus
• Begin reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through Vol. I Ch. III.
• See also: slides with maps and images: Sublime Places of Frankenstein

W 10-16

F 10-18

M 10-21

• Finish Frankenstein.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (Leigh Hunt’s Examiner: January, 1818) with Horace Smith, Ozymandias (Examiner: February, 1818)

W 10-23

• Percy Bysshe Shelley:
  • The Mask of Anarchy
• George Gordon, Lord Byron (short poems):
  • Darkness

F 10-25

• So we’ll go no more a roving
• Start Lord Byron’s Beppo: a Venetian Story, read roughly the first half, through stanza 46 (to the point signed Printer's Devil.
• See also Byron and Orientalism image / map slides

M 10-28

• Finish Byron’s “Beppo: a Venetian Story”.
• On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

W 10-30

John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes with Ode to Psyche

Initiate Midterm Exam 2 (take-home exam)

F 11-01

• Start reading Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights through the end of Chapter III (3).
• Slides on the Brontës and Wuthering Heights

M 11-04

W 11-06

F 11-08

M 11-11

W 11-13

F 11-15

• my slideshow notes on The Industrial Revolution and the Hungry Forties
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children (1844)
• Excerpts from the Sadler Report on Child Labor (1832)
• Sound of a power loom

M 11-18

• Victorian Issues: Evolution: Charles Darwin excerpts from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, with Tennyson, intro + stanzas from In Memoriam. From facsimile publication of In Memoriam:
  • Beginning
  • Sections LV and LVI: Nature red in tooth and claw passage
• Slides on Darwin vs. Religion: Darwin and the Victorians
• Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 from Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodson), Alice in Wonderland

W 11-20

F 11-22

M 11-25 to F 11-29

M 12-02

W 12-04

F 12-06

M 12-09 to F 12-13