Required Texts | Assignments | Class Schedule | Bibliographical Information for Report Articles

Required Texts:

• Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui (Penguin)
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford UP)
• Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford UP)
• Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl (Oxford UP)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford UP)
• Course packet

Assignments:

• report (12-15 minutes), 15%
• seminar (20-25 minutes), 25%
• essay (5000-6000 words, due April 21st), 50%
• participation, 10%

N.B.: All work must be fully and properly documented according to a recent edition of the MLA Handbook.

Students must sign up for their reports and seminars by January 23rd. The report should, like a scholarly book review, critically analyze the specified material, conveying the import of the material to the class as well as your analysis of it. The seminar can be used to address any course-related topic in connection with one, or more, of the works of literature assigned for the week in which it is presented; arguments may be tentative and questions may be raised as well as answered, but the seminar should be helpful to the class and facilitate class discussion. Both the report and the seminar must be submitted in writing one week after they are presented.

The essay may be derived from your seminar, but must be substantially different from it. The participation grade will be based on contributions to class discussion, whether questions, comments, or answers, and the quality of those contributions will be the primary consideration. I am open, as a matter of principle, to any coherent and well-applied critical methodology relevant to the course material and focus.

Class Schedule

Read and consider the assigned material before the week in which it is discussed so that you are prepared to discuss and explore the material with the class. Students are strongly encouraged to read the essays and chapters listed for reports as they will form part of class discussion on that day. An asterisk marks material in the coursepacket.

January 9^th: Introduction

Building the Nation: Landscape & National Identity

January 16^th: "Of a National Character in Literature"*; Waters, "Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772-1820"*; W. Drennan, "Glendalloch"*; Moore, "By that Lake, Whose Gloomy Shore"*; MacCarthy, "A Walk by the Bay of Dublin"*

January 23^rd: Lloyd, Introduction to Nationalism and Minor Literature*; Mangan, "The Lovely Land"*; Carleton, Introduction to Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry*; Davis, "Influences of Education"*

January 30th: Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl; Anthony Smith, "Neoclassicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions"*

• Report on Ina Ferris’s "Public Address: The National Tale and the Pragmatics of Sympathy":  Meagan Timney
• 1 seminar    Ryan Van Huijstee

Fearing the Nation: The Blighted Land

February 6^th: Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; Carleton, "Wildgoose Lodge"*

• Report on Michael Neill's "Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls: Ironic Guise and Colonial Subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent"
• Report on Susan Glover's "Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-Dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent"   Becca Babcock
• 1 seminar Vanessa Lent

February 13^th: Cancelled.

Reading Week

February 27th:  Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

• Report on Julian Moynahan's "The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic: Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Lefanu, and the Return of the Repressed"     Ryan Van Huijstee
• Report on Margot Gayle Backus's "'A Very Strange Agony': Parables of Sexual Subject Formation in Melmoth the Wanderer, Carmilla, and Dracula"
• 1 or 2 seminars    Becca Babcock; Jeremy De Vito

March 6th: Maturin (cont.); Boucicault, Arrah-na-Pogue*

• Report on Elizabeth Butler Cullingford’s "National Identities in Performance: The Stage Englishman of Boucicault's Irish Drama" Jeremy De Vito
• 1 seminar  Meagan Timney

March 13^th: J.S. Drennan, "A Wail, 1847"*; Wilde, "A Lament for the Potato"*; LeFanu, "The Familiar" and "Carmilla"

• Helen Stoddart, "'The Precautions of Nervous People Are Infectious': Sheridan Le Fanu's Symptomatic Gothic" Nikki Little
• 1 or 2 seminars Gordon Miller; Johnathan Mina

• Susan B. Taylor's "Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh" Vanessa Lent
• 1 seminar  Nikki Little

Bibliographical Information for Report Articles

(Note:  all items are in the Killam Library; some are available online through the library’s subscription to ProQuest and Taylor's essay is freely available on the web.)

• Arata, Stephen. "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization." Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45.
• Backus, Margot Gayle. "'A Very Strange Agony': Parables of Sexual Subject Formation in Melmoth the Wanderer, Carmilla, and Dracula." The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.
• Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. "National Identities in Performance: The Stage Englishman of Boucicault's Irish Drama." Theatre Journal 49 (1997): 287-300.
• Ferris, Ina. "Public Address: The National Tale and the Pragmatics of Sympathy." The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 46-73.
• Glover, Susan. "Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-Dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent." Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 295-311.
• Helen Stoddart, "'The Precautions of Nervous People Are Infectious': Sheridan Le Fanu's Symptomatic Gothic."  Modern Language Review 86 (1991): 19-34.
• McKee, Patricia. "Racialization, Capitalism, and Aesthetics in Stoker’s Dracula." Novel 36 (2002): 42-60.
• Moynahan, Julian. "The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic: Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Lefanu, and the Return of the Repressed." Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. 109-35.
• Neill, Michael. "Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls: Ironic Guise and Colonial Subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent." Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 76-90.
• Taylor, Susan B. "Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh." The Containment and Redeployment of English India. Ed. Daniel J. O’Quinn. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Online: http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/containment/taylor/taylor.html