ENGLISH LITERATURE I

Università degli Studi
"G. d'Annunzio"

Chieti - Pescara

Single discipline educational activity

Course Sheet

Course code:

L0022

Academic Year of enrolment:

2018

Year of supply:

2018/2019

Type of Course:

Basic

Degree:

Course of 1st Cycle Degree in LINGUISTIC MEDIATION AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Disciplinary Sector:

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Location:

PESCARA

Credits:

Programme Year:

Professor and Collaborators:

SETTE Miriam

Cycle:

Second semester

Hours of classroom activity:

Individual study hours:

114

Objectives

Illustration of the literary period, from the age of the Restoration up to the post-Victorian age.

Particular attention will be paid to the birth and evolution of the modern bourgeois novel, beginning with an analysis of exemplary texts by Daniel Defoe, and moving on to examine the nexus between literature and science in the later nineteenth century, finding its examples in the prose fiction of Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells.
Through the study of some of the narratives of these authors, students will explore key aspects of the history of English thought from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, with particular reference to cultural and scientific debate during this period.

Contents

The course is divided into three sections which will be organized as follows:

Part 1 (3 credits):
Science and pseudoscience in the eighteenth-century English novel.
Primary texts:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, any edition in the original language.
-----------------, The Storm, any edition in the original language.

The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge University Press, 2008;
Miriam Sette, Il Fantastico in Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe e la Ragione trasfiguratrice, Carocci, Rome 2010.

Part 2 (2 Credits):
Biological models in English literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast, any edition in the original language.
Herbert George Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, any edition in the original language.

Miriam Sette, Trittico sulla metamorfosi: Kipling, Wells, Garnett, Liguori, Naples 2015. Rudyard Kipling, Il Marchio della Bestia e altri racconti del Fantastico, edited by Miriam Sette.

Part 3 (1 credit):
The Long Eighteenth Century
Reference texts:
Arturo Cattaneo, A Short History of English Literature, Mondadori University, Milan 2011, voll. 1, 2

Extended Syllabus

Defoe is the ideal interpreter of the intellectual revolution that occurred during the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century: that is, in the field of physics the movement from Galileo to Newton, and in the field of philosophy the movement from Bacon to Locke. Both these developments show the transition from abstract and metaphysical preconceptions towards an increasing commitment to empiricism and the formation of rationalist systems, aimed at ordering and assimilating the growing body of knowledge of natural science.
These changes led to the emergence of new scientific paradigms in the nineteenth century, many of them associated with Positivism, a natural offshoot of empirical and enlightenment debate. Positivist thought exercised a powerful influence on the work of Kipling, Wells, and Garnett, and especially so in relation to their ideas about human and animal biology.
So, for example, in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, the atmosphere is pervaded by scientific hubris, manifesting itself in Moreau’s ambition to manipulate the biological by means of technological tools. The work done in Moreau’s laboratory, where animals are transformed into men, has its intellectual origins in the mechanistic and evolutionist biologism of the positivist age. Thus the end of the nineteenth century already hints at the strong impact of biotechnologies, made possible by Darwinian ideas on the adaptability and even the modification of species – ideas that continue to inform modern accounts of the science of life, and the possibilities opened up in our time by genetic engineering.

Recommended Bibliography

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; The Storm; Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast; Herbert George Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Teaching Methods

Frontal lessons

Evaluation methods

Verification of learning:

The oral final exam will consist of a number of questions (3-5) on the texts included in the syllabus, the historical context, the English culture of the Long 18th Century, and the critical bibliography in the syllabus. The exam will assess the following skills and abilities: detailed knowledge of the primary texts; ability to contextualize texts from a historical and cultural point of view; close analysis of the formal and thematic features of texts. The grading scale goes from 1 to 30 cum laude (excellent). The exam is graded: excellent (30 cum laude-30); very good (27-29); good (24-26), fair (21 -23), sufficient (18-22), insufficient (17 or below).

Contacts/More Information

As far as the period considered, ie The Long Eighteenth Century, which embraces English literary history from 1660 to 1832, the following authors are particularly relevant:

The Restoration and the Early XVIII Century (1660-1798)
John Dryden (1631-1700): "Absalom and Achitophel" (1681).
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703).
John Bunyan (1628-1688): "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1675).
William Congreve (1670-1729).
The Augustan Age
Daniel Defoe (1660? -1731).
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).
Alexander Pope (1688-1744).
Augustan Modes in Poetry
Samuel Butler (1612-1680).
John Gay (1685-1732): "The Beggar's Opera" (1728).
The Periodical Essay
Joseph Addison (1672-1719).
Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729).
The Poetry of Sensibility
James Thomson (1700-1748): "The Seasons".
Thomas Gray (1716-1771): "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".
William Collins (1721-1759).
Christopher Smart (1722-1771).
Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774): "The Deserted Village".
George Crabbe (1754-1832).
William Cowper (1731-1800).
Biographies
James Boswell (1740-1795): Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
The novel (from Richardson to Austen)
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Pamela.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Joseph Andrews.
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), Roderick Random (1748).
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), Tristram Shandy (1759-1767).
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Rasselas (1759).
Henry Mackenzie (1745-18319), The Man of Feeling (1771).
The Gothic Novel
Horace Walpole (1717-1797), The Castle of Otranto (1765).
William Beckford (1760-1844), Vathek (1786).
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), The Monk (1796).
Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Domestic Fiction
Fanny Burney (1752-1840), Evelina (1778).
Jane Austen (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Università degli Studi
"G. d'Annunzio"

Chieti - Pescara

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