Course Co-ordinator: Professor Cairns Craig

Pre-requisite(s): Available only to registered postgraduate students

This course explores the development in Ireland and Scotland of kinds of literature which came to be typical of the movement now classed as 'Romanticism'. Beginning from James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry, it traces the changing relationship of art to nature and the emergence of an identification of the nation with the qualities of its natural environment. The development of specific modes of literature - pastoral, georgic, 'national tale', the Gothic and the historical novel - are traced in relation to developing constructions of national identity - British, Irish, Scottish, Celtic, Teutonic - to which they contribute. The course will plot the mutual influence of writers and texts from the two countries - Macpherson's Ossian on Charlotte Brooke's Reliques, Maria Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent) on Walter Scott (the Waverley novels) and Scott on Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer) - and the ways in which they stimulate each other to distinctive representations of the nation.

1 x 2-hour seminar, weekly, plus 6 x 1-hour training sessions.

Essay (80%); presentation (20%).