UWA Handbook 2023

Unit Overview

Description

This unit explores the Romantic Movement and its long aftermath through a range of noted writers including John Keats, Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë. Their engagement with the social and cultural changes created by the French Revolution produced innovations in fiction, poetry and prose, and helped form much of what we regard as modern experience and ideas. Topics investigated include Romantic concerns with social outsiders and individual freedom; disenchantment with reason and emphasis on the imagination; the re-evaluation of nature and criticism of urban industrialism; and outspoken concern for social justice. The unit considers Romantic and Gothic preoccupations with questions of gender and class power. It also draws attention to and critiques the formative influence of Romantic aesthetics and values on the subsequent decades of the long nineteenth century, on modern literary theory and especially on understandings of the Romantics themselves.

Credit

6 points

Offering
(see Timetable)

Availability	Location	Mode
Semester 1	UWA (Perth)	Face to face
Semester 1	Albany	Face to face

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 2 option in the English and Literary Studies major sequence
• Level 2 elective

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) acquire an informed understanding of the literary and cultural change in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England—one of the seminal periods for the development of English studies; (2) form an historicised understanding of fundamental critical concepts, such as Romanticism, Victorianism and the Gothic, allowing them to recognise and discuss the relationship between the concepts and the literary and cultural practices textually revealed; (3) read and critique a range of discursively complex nineteenth-century British prose and poetry, a skill readily transferable to twenty-first century discourses with their own modern day complexities; (4) acquire a critical understanding of the role played by issues such as gender, equality, natural rights and liberty in literary and cultural texts; (5) express ideas, information and argument coherently and logically in written and oral forms; (6) work effectively as a member of a collaborative group in a tutorial context; (7) enhance research skills in locating and assessing critical writing in traditional and/or digital media; (8) gain a critical understanding of the role played by ideologies of race, gender, and class in literary and cultural contexts; (9) refine and demonstrate highly developed skills of textual analysis and critical reasoning; (10) acquire an historicised understanding of fundamental critical concepts that allow them to recognise and discuss the relationship between the formal, thematic and functional aspects of any text studied; and (11) further develop and practise enquiry-based learning and research and communication acquired at Level 2 into Level 3 units in English and Cultural Studies, with applications across a broader field of study at UWA.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) tutorial participation; (2) a written response to a text; and (3) research essay. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Professor Tanya Dalziell

Unit rules

Prerequisites

any Level 1 English unit

Contact hours

3 hours per teaching week

Note

Students impacted by COVID19 travel restrictions are asked to contact the unit coordinator for online options