ENGLISH 665. Studies in Romantic Literature

Romantic Travellers

David S. Miall

Winter term 1999. Thursdays 1400-1650, HC 3-78
Lab facility in Dent/Pharm 4066

David.Miall@UAlberta.ca

Graphic: Detail from "Low Wood Inn" (Windermere). T. H. Fielding, A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes (London: R. Ackermann, 1821). The mountains of Langdale form the background.

Course description | Texts | Schedule
Compass points | Bibliography of secondary literature
Internet: student projects and other resources

Course description

Several eighteenth-century British writers made notable journeys outside England, such as Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Laurence Sterne, and left influential accounts in travel books or letters. The tradition of the Grand Tour, the extended visit to Europe that completed an aristocrat's education, was also established during the eighteenth century. The advent of Romantic writing in the 1780s and 1790s thus coincided with an unprecedented degree of mobility and a corresponding demand for travel literature of various kinds, from guides to imaginative fiction. When the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars disrupted this, travellers turned to Britain, discovering the Lake District, Wales and Scotland. Byron and the Shelleys were among the first to resume European travel when Europe became open once more.

Roffla Falls In this course we will examine the travel phenomenon both through the writing of the most important travel writers of the period from Gilpin to Starke, some of which is of high literary quality, and through poetic and fictional representations of travel from Radcliffe to Byron. We will also consider the equally dramatic rise in the consumption of prints and paintings during the period, such as those produced in the studios of Rudolph Ackermann, and examine the evolution of landscape in this form during the period. These studies will serve to raise several issues, such as:

Management of the course will be conducted in part through this web site.

Texts

Required texts (available from bookshop)

William Godwin, St. Leon (OUP)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (OUP)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1818 text (OUP)
William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)

Most of the primary travel texts shown on the Schedule below will be available through Romanticism: The CD-ROM, ed. Miall & Wu (Blackwell, 1997), available in Dent/Pharm 4066 (from January 7), Rutherford North (CD workstation #3), and other locations, to be announced.

Schedule

Our reading will be focused mainly on specific texts (mostly literary), which will then be examined in relation to the landscape and the travel or theoretical writings that influence their authors. We will finish by reading some texts that appear to offer an ecological perspective. Asterisked texts are available on Romanticism: The CD-ROM.

1. William Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (1798)

Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (1770)*
William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye (1771)*
Richard Warner, A Walk Through Wales, in August 1797 (1801)*

The Picturesque:
Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790)*
William Gilpin, Observations on Picturesque Beauty (1792)*
Uvedale Price, On the Picturesque (1794), Chapters 4, 5 (internet text)
Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape . . . addressed to Uvedale Price (1795)
Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1808)*

Tintern and New Historicism

2. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

The Sublime:
Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)*
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759)*

Ramond de Carbonnières, Travels in the Pyrenees (1781), trans. F. Gold (1813). To selected extracts
Pierre Jean Grosley, New Observations on Italy (1769)*
Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections [on] France, Italy (1789)*
Ann Radcliffe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795)*

3. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

3.1 Lake District: Books 1, 2, 4, 8, 11:258-397

Thomas Gray, Journal of travels in the Lake District (1775)*
William Hutchinson, An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland (1776)*
Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes (1778)*
William Gilpin, Observations on Picturesque Beauty [and on the Lake District] (1792)*

3.2 1790 walking tour: Book 6:332-705

Thomas Gray, On the Grande Chartreuse, Geneva, and Mont Cenis (1739)*
William Coxe, Sketches of . . . Swisserland (1779)*
John Moore, A View of . . . France, Switzerland, and Germany (1779)*
Thomas Martyn, Sketch of a Tour through Swisserland (1787)*

3.3 Snowdon: Book 13:1-119

Richard Warner, A Walk Through Wales, in August 1797 (1801)*
Edward Pugh, Cambria Depicta: A Tour through North Wales (1816)*

4. Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland (1798)*

5. William Godwin, St. Leon (1799)

"The Inquisition of Spain; with Anecdotes of some of its More Illustrious Victims," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 20 (July, 1826), 70-89.*

6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

M. T. Bourrit, A Journey to the Glaciers in the Dutchy of Savoy (1775)*
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc" (1816)*
Mary Shelley and P. B. Shelley, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)*
Anon., A Picturesque Tour through France, Switzerland . . . (1817)*
Byron, Childe Harold, Canto III (1816)

7. Byron, Manfred (1816-17)*

Byron's Swiss Tour (1816), journal letter from Thomas Moore, The Works of Lord Byron (1832)*

8. Ecological perspectives

John Oswald, The Cry of Nature (1791)*
William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina . . . (1792)*

Internet Resources

Student presentations on the web

University of Alberta:

Campus resources:

Remote:

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Document last revised: April 7th 1999