Università Roma Tre

Aims: Students will develop a good knowledge of English literature and culture from the
Restoration (1660) to Romanticism (1830). The course will introduce students to the most
significant critical approaches of literary theory with particular emphasis on the specificities of
literary language and on the intertextual, intermedial, intercultural aspects of a good range of
literary texts. Students will develop an ability to critically engage with literary works and their
cultural and historical contexts.

Programme: This course provides an overview of English literature through the study of a variety
of texts by some of the most representative authors of the British canon

Fiction

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)


Reading List
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
or
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Poetry

John Milton
Cavalier Poets
Andrew Marvell
John Dryden
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Thomas Gray
William Cowper
William Blake
William Wordsworth
S. T. Coleridge
George Byron, Lord
Walter Scott, Sir
John Keats

N. B. The list is subject to revisions. Please check again later during the year.

The course will offer an historical and literary overview of the Long Eighteenth Century in which the most important cultural trends of the Restoration, the Enlightenment and Romanticism will be highlighted through the analysis of a number of meanignful texts by different authors and genres (prose, poetry, drama). The module will particularly focus on three specific topics: 1) poetry and neoclassicism: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712) and John Keats, Endymion (1818); 2) the second-generation Romantics and Italy: Byron and Shelley; 3) the development of the novel from Realism to Gothic and back: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

An anthology of texts and a number of critical essay will be uploaded on the teacher's webpage (Materiali didattici 2016-17)
P. Bertinetti, English Literature. A Short History, Einaudi, Torino 2010 (Chapters v, vi, vii)

Primary sources
Alexander Pope, Il riccio rapito, a cura di Viola Papetti con testo inglese a fronte, BUR, MIlano 2014
John Keats, Endimione, a cura di Viola Papetti con testo inglese a fronte, BUR, Milano 2011
Shelley, Keats e Byron. I ragazzi che amavano il vento, traduzione di Roberto Mussapi, Feltrinelli, MIlano 2009
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin Classics o Oxford World's Classics
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Penguin Classics
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, traduzione di L. Lamberti con testo inglese a fronte, Einaudi, Torino 2011

Critical texts
Viola Papetti (a cura di), Il Neoclassicismo inglese. Da Pope a Johnson, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 2002 (selected chapters)
Marcello Pagnini (a cura di), Il Romanticismo, Il Mulino, Bologna 1986 (selected chapters)
Keymer T, and J. Mee, The Cmabridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830, CUP 2004 (selected Chapters)