TeachingBritish Literature

DAVID DAMROSCH

Columbia University

CHRISTOPHER BASWELL

University of California, Los Angeles

ANNE HOWLAND SCHOTTER

Wagner College

CONSTANCE JORDAN

Claremont Graduate University

CLARE CARROLL

Queens College, CUNY

STUART SHERMAN

Fordham University

CYNTHIA WALL

University of Virginia

PETER J. MANNING

Stony Brook University

SUSAN J. WOLFSON

Princeton University

HEATHER HENDERSON

WILLIAM CHAPMAN SHARPE

Barnard College

JENNIFER WICKE

University of Virginia

KEVIN J. H. DETTMAR

Southern Illinois University

TeachingBritish Literature

A Companion to

The Longman Anthologyof British Literature

SECOND EDITION

David Damrosch

General Editor

Christopher Baswell

Anne Howland Schotter

Constance Jordan

Clare Carroll

Stuart Sherman with Cynthia Wall

Peter J. Manning

Susan J. Wolfson

Heather Henderson

William Chapman Sharpe

Jennifer Wicke

Kevin J. H. Dettmar

New York San Francisco Boston

London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore Madrid

Mexico City Munich Paris Cape Town Hong Kong Montreal

Vice President and Editor-in-Chief: Joseph Terry

Senior Supplements Editor: Donna Campion

Electronic Project Management and Page Makeup: Dianne Hall

Teaching British Literature: A Companion to The Longman Anthology of British Literature,

Second Edition, by David Damrosch et al.

Copyright © 2003 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Instructors may re-

produce portions of this book for classroom use only. All other reproductions are

strictly prohibited without prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 0-321-11584-8

12345678910—MV —05040302

NOTE REGARDING WEBSITES AND PASSWORDS:

If you need a password to access instructor supplements on a Longman

book-specific Website, use the following information:

Username: awlbook

Password: adopt

CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface xi

Sample Syllabi xix

The Middle AgesBefore the Norman Conquest

Beowulf 1

The Táin bó Cuailnge 3

Early Irish Verse 8

Judith 9

The Dream of the Rood 11

PERSPECTIVES: ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS 12

Taliesin 16

The Wanderer 17

Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament 18

Riddles 20

After the Norman ConquestArthurian Myth in History and Romance 22

PERSPECTIVES: ARTHURIAN MYTH IN THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN 23

Marie de France 26

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 29

Sir Thomas Malory 34

Geoffrey Chaucer 39

The Canterbury Tales 45

William Langland 61

“PIERS PLOWMAN” AND ITS TIME 61

Mystical Writings 69

Julian of Norwich 70

Richard Rolle 72

v

The Cloud of Unknowing 73

Medieval Cycle Drama 74

The Second Play of the Shepherds 75

The York Play of the Crucifixion 77

Vernacular Religion and Repression 78

Margery Kempe 81

Middle English Lyrics 83

Religious Lyrics 85

The Tale of Taliesin 87

Dafydd ap Gwilym 89

William Dunbar 92

Robert Henryson 94

Late Medieval Allegory 95

John Lydgate 97

Mankind 97

Christine de Pizan 99

The Ear ly Modern Period

John Skelton 101

Sir Thomas Wyatt 101

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 102

Sir Thomas More 103

PERSPECTIVES: GOVERNMENT AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 106

George Gascoigne 107

Edmund Spenser 108

Sir Philip Sidney 117

“THE APOLOGY” AND ITS TIME 121

Isabella Whitney 122

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke 122

Elizabeth I 124

Aemilia Lanyer 126

Sir Walter Raleigh 128

“THE DISCOVERY” AND ITS TIME 131

Richard Barnfield 132

Christopher Marlowe 133

William Shakespeare 137

vi Contents

viiContents

PERSPECTIVES: ENGLAND IN THE NEW WORLD 145

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton 147

“THE ROARING GIRL” AND ITS TIME 148

PERSPECTIVES: TRACTS ON WOMEN AND GENDER 149

Thomas Campion 151

Michael Drayton 152

Ben Jonson 152

John Donne 155

Lady Mary Wroth 159

Robert Herrick 161

George Herbert 162

PERSPECTIVES: EMBLEM, STYLE, METAPHOR 163

Richard Lovelace 164

Henry Vaughan 164

Andrew Marvell 164

Katherine Philips 166

Francis Bacon 167

The King James Bible 168

Lady Mary Wroth 168

Thomas Hobbes 169

Sir Thomas Browne 169

Robert Burton 170

PERSPECTIVES: THE CIVIL WAR, OR THE WAR OF THREE KINGDOMS 171

John Milton 172

PERSPECTIVES: SPIRITUAL SELF-RECKONINGS 179

The Restorat ion and the Eighteenth Century

Ways In 181

Samuel Pepys 182

Mary Carleton 187

PERSPECTIVES: THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND THE NEW SCIENCE 188

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 191

John Dryden 193

The Secular Masque 198

Aphra Behn 199

John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester 204

William Wycherley 206

Mary Astell 210

Daniel Defoe 211

PERSPECTIVES: READING PAPERS 213

Jonathan Swift 218

Alexander Pope 221

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 231

John Gay 233

William Hogarth 239

PERSPECTIVES: MIND AND GOD 241

James Thomson 246

“THE SEASONS” AND ITS TIME 248

Thomas Gray 249

Samuel Johnson 251

James Boswell 262

Hester Salusbury Thrale Piozzi 265

Oliver Goldsmith 266

Richard Brinsley Sheridan 268

The Romantics and Their Contemporaries

Anna Letitia Barbauld 275

Charlotte Turner Smith 276

PERSPECTIVES: THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND THE REVOLUTION

CONTROVERSY 278

William Blake 280

PERSPECTIVES: THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE 282

Mary Robinson 284

Mary Wollstonecraft 286

PERSPECTIVES: THE WOLLSTONECRAFT CONTROVERSY AND THE RIGHTS

OF WOMEN 287

Joanna Baillie 289

Literary Ballads 289

William Wordsworth 290

Dorothy Wordsworth 295

PERSPECTIVES: THE SUBLIME, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE PICTURESQUE 297

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 304

viii Contents

Lectures on Shakespeare 313

George Gordon, Lord Byron 314

Percy Bysshe Shelley 320

Felicia Hemans 330

John Clare 334

John Keats 336

PERSPECTIVES: POPULAR PROSE AND THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHORSHIP 344

The Victorian AgeThomas Carlyle 355

PERSPECTIVES: THE INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE 357

John Stuart Mill 359

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 363

Alfred, Lord Tennyson 367

Edward FitzGerald 375

Charles Darwin 378

PERSPECTIVES: RELIGION AND SCIENCE 385

Robert Browning 393

Charles Dickens 399

Elizabeth Gaskell 404

Thomas Hardy 406

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 408

Edith Nesbit 411

John Ruskin 413

Florence Nightingale 418

PERSPECTIVES: VICTORIAN LADIES AND GENTLEMEN 420

Matthew Arnold 430

Dante Gabriel Rossetti 439

Christina Rossetti 441

William Morris 444

Algernon Charles Swinburne 447

Walter Pater 450

Gerard Manley Hopkins 453

Lewis Carroll 456

PERSPECTIVES: IMAGINING CHILDHOOD 458

Rudyard Kipling 470

PERSPECTIVES: TRAVEL AND EMPIRE 475

ixContents

Robert Louis Stevenson 490

Oscar Wilde 492

PERSPECTIVES: AESTHETES AND DECADENTS 502

The Twentieth CenturyWays In 511

Joseph Conrad 515

Bernard Shaw 527

Thomas Hardy 531

PERSPECTIVES: THE GREAT WAR: CONFRONTING THE MODERN 535

Speeches on Irish Independence 540

William Butler Yeats 541

James Joyce 546

T. S. Eliot 550

Virginia Woolf 553

PERSPECTIVES: REGENDERING MODERNISM 562

D. H. Lawrence 577

P. G. Wodehouse 582

Graham Greene 582

PERSPECTIVES: WORLD WAR II AND THE END OF EMPIRE 582

Evelyn Waugh 585

Dylan Thomas 591

Samuel Beckett 594

W. H. Auden 596

Stevie Smith 598

Philip Larkin 599

Sylvia Plath 601

Ted Hughes 601

Thom Gunn 602

V. S. Naipaul 603

Caryl Churchill 605

PERSPECTIVES: WHOSE LANGUAGE? 607

Teaching with Audio 617

About the Editors 633

Index of Authors 637

x Contents

General Editor’s Preface

Extensively revised along with the new edition of The Longman Anthology of British

Literature, this companion volume carries farther the ambitious aims we set for our

first edition. First, it has been written directly by the editors responsible for each

period. Second, it discusses every major author or combination of authors in the

anthology, opening up possible lines of approach, indicating fruitful connections

that could be made, and sketching important trends in scholarly debate. Our third

goal has been to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, and we have hoped to in-

form people who are new to some of this material while also intriguing people

interested in a fresh take on familiar works. Our whole effort in the body of the

anthology has been to construct exciting and teachable conjunctions of classic and

newly current works, and this volume gives us a chance to expand on the reasons

behind our choices, and to indicate ways that we have found these materials to

work best in class.

An Evolving Collaboration

In revising this teaching companion, we have taken advantage of responses and

suggestions from many people who have been using the anthology in the class-

room. Their advice and comments guided us in revising existing entries and in

planning out our additions of new authors and clusters of works for this edition.

This revised companion volume includes new entries for all our major additions,

and we have also created a new opening section of sample syllabi. Several of these

have come to us from people who responded to an invitation via our e-mail

newsletter; others are syllabi developed by members of our editorial board as we’ve

taught from the anthology ourselves. Naturally, these syllabi give only a sampling

of some of the ways the anthology can be used, but it can be interesting to see how

people at other institutions have approached teaching with the anthology. I would

like to expand this section in future, and so I welcome syllabi from other users of

the full anthology or its individual volumes. The present selection concentrates on

giving an example each of several different kinds of course, but next time round it

would be interesting to include creative alternatives for similar courses.

I also welcome suggestions for improvements to the anthology itself. Teaching

texts normally go into new editions every few years, with the editors making a few

cosmetic changes to justify the new edition. We view The Longman Anthology quite

differently, much as we view the British literary canon otherwise than as a fixed se-

ries of timeless monuments. Our anthology is meant as a resource for teachers in

an evolving and growing field, and our second edition gives new attention to a va-

xi

riety of authors and topics currently receiving substantial attention in literary stud-

ies: vernacular religion in the medieval period; “England in the New World” in

early modern times, “Imagining Childhood” in the Victorian era, to name a few.

Our new entries in this companion volume address these new features of the an-

thology, and revisions to existing entries suggest new ways to approach works al-

ready included in the first edition. Going forward, I would be delighted to hear

what things you would most like to see added in the next edition, and to learn what

existing combinations work best for you, what others might better be rethought. I

can be reached by e-mail at dnd2@columbia.edu or by letter at the Department of

English, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York NY 10027.

Typo Alert!

At a more local scale, I would be very grateful if you would let me know of any

typos you find in the anthology (or indeed, in this manual). There is a great deal

of new material in this edition, and we have made revisions to existing introduc-

tions and notes throughout, so typos are always a concern. Every page has been

proofread both by the editors and by in-house proofreaders, and no errors have

turned up to match the most memorable typos the first time round—a pair of quiv-

ering limbs turning into quivering lambs; Beckett’s Texts for Nothing turning into

some sort of travel promotion, Texas for Nothing; the Nietzschean transvaluation of

Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode into the Immorality Ode—but some typos are proba-

bly still hiding in the six thousand pages of the anthology. So please let me know

of any lingering errors that you encounter, as well as sending in broader ideas and

suggestions of all sorts.

Using the Anthology

A distinctive feature of our anthology is the grouping of works in Perspectives sec-

tions, in clusters illustrating a work “and Its Time,” and as companion readings

where there is a direct link between two texts. Together, these groupings are intended

to set works in cultural context for students, and these groupings have a strategic ped-

agogical function as well. We had observed that in other anthologies, brief author

listings rarely seemed to get taught. Added in with the laudable goal of increasing an

anthology’s range and inclusiveness, the new materials too often would get lost in the

shuffle, hemmed in between the major author listings. Our groupings of works clus-

ter shorter selections in ways that make them more likely to be taught, creating a crit-

ical mass of texts around a compelling literary or social issue.

At the same time, we expect that our various contextual groupings will be used

variously by different people. As our sample syllabi show, a Perspectives section can

be taught entire as a freestanding unit, or it can share a week with an important

work or major author. Thus, the Early Modern section on “Government and Self-

Government” can be taught directly along with More’s Utopia, which it follows, or

can be used as a general resource for explorations of political issues in such works

as The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, and Paradise Lost. Alternatively, individual works

xii General Editor’s Preface

within that Perspectives section can be paired with works elsewhere: for example,

those selections that treat government within families, and specifically discuss re-

lations between husbands and wives, can be used as context for discussions of the

politics of gender in several of the period’s writers. In the Twentieth Century,

“Regendering Modernism” makes a highly teachable unit in itself, but stories

within that Perspectives section can also readily be used in different conjunctions.

Several stories could be brought together to make a cluster of short fiction, in-

cluding stories by Joyce, Lawrence, and Wodehouse; or the stories by Sackville-

West, Forster, and Mansfield with colonial settings could be taught together with

Heart of Darkness and Graham Greene’s A Chance for Mr Lever.

Particularly in the case of our fuller Perspectives sections, like the Romantic-era

section on the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, it can be productive to as-

sign different readings to different members of the class, with people working in

teams to explore contrasting viewpoints; these can then be debated in class, or pre-

sented as written projects. Students interested in exploring Perspectives section is-

sues in greater depth should be alerted to the extensive bibliographies at the end

of each volume; Perspectives sections, as well as individual author listings, have bib-

liographies which can lead students farther into the primary sources.

Students will also find many current leads on our website, located at

www.awlonline.com/damrosch, which has been greatly revised and augmented. A

particularly useful new feature is an interactive time line, which gives information

and directs students to web resources on a wide variety of authors, works, and issues.

Obviously, the several Perspectives sections and the clusters of texts on a work

“and Its Time” are only a few of the many groupings that could be created. We

wouldn’t want any student to come away from the course with the misconception

that these were the only issues that mattered in the period in question. Rather,

these groupings should be seen as exemplary of the sorts of literary and cultural de-

bate that were current in an era. Students can be encouraged—individually or in

small groups—to research and develop their own perspectival clusters of materials,

using as a point of departure some text or some issue that has particularly in-

trigued them. They could then present their own “Perspectives” section to the class

as a whole, or write it up and analyze it as a term project.

Our broader groupings are similarly intended to be used in various ways. Thus,

in the medieval period, we have included Mankind in our section on “Late

Medieval Allegory,” but it could also be taught directly together with the medieval

cycle dramas earlier in the period. In our section on the Romantics and their con-

temporaries, the “Literary Ballads” can be taught as a unit, or Burns, for example,

could be paired with a variety of other poets, from Blake to John Clare.

On a larger scale, we have followed custom in dividing the anthology according

to the period divisions that have become ubiquitous in modern literary study, but

there is no reason that a survey course should treat them as sacrosanct. Even within

a generally chronological presentation, it can be interesting to have some cross-cut-

ting sessions or weeks, such as an overview of the sonnet, or a section on travel writ-

ing, or one on the short story. Such groupings can bring together material from two,

three, or even more sections of the anthology. One advantage of our six-volume for-

xiiiGeneral Editor’s Preface

mat is that different combinations of volumes can also be used: Peter J. Manning,

for instance, has been teaching a course in the long eighteenth century using a pair-

ing of volumes 1C and 2A to explore the period from 1660 through 1832. Our

greatest hope is that teachers and students alike will use our table of contents as a

starting-point for ongoing explorations and reconfigurations of their own.

Reading the Illustrations

The hundred black-and-white illustrations in our first edition are now joined by

the color images we’ve added for each period. These are very much conceived as

part of the anthology’s teachable material, and the extensive captions for the color

images, and for many of the black-and-white ones, are intended to signal effective

avenues of approach to them. Many of the images work directly with particular au-

thors or works, but valuable points can be made with images of more general im-

port. The cover illustrations for our two big volumes can serve as cases in point.

The illustration for Volume 1, the frontispiece to John’s Gospel in The Book of

Kells, gives a haunting image from one of the masterpieces of medieval Irish art.

This eighth-century manuscript testifies to richness of medieval Celtic culture and

the vitality of early Irish Christianity, even as its intricate designs show the ongo-

ing ebullience of pagan visual forms and motifs. The picture is also one of many

medieval representations of books and writing. Poised to write the gospel his

viewer is about to read, the Evangelist is framed within an intricate border that it-

self is the body of Christ—the Word of God with whom John’s gospel begins. This

Word-made-flesh has hands, feet, and head, yet as one modern commentator

notes, he is “more suggested than described, the painter trying to convey by this

device the unknowable character of God” (Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells:

Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin [Knopf, 1974], 194).

The cover to Volume 2 gives J. W. Waterhouse’s painting Destiny. Painted in

1900, near the end of the Victorian era and at the beginning of the new century,

Destiny shows the medieval heroine Isolde poised between her own past and fu-

ture. About to sail from her native Ireland to marry King Mark of Cornwall, whom

she has never met, she unwittingly drinks a love potion that will inaugurate her

fatal love affair with her escort, Tristan. Waterhouse combines pre-Raphaelite

medievalism with concerns that the modernists would soon make their own.

Ambiguity and illusion predominate in the presentation: what at first seems to be

a window is in fact a mirror, reflecting sailing ships that are behind the viewer

rather than behind Isolde. Whose destiny is really being shown? In Idylls of the

King, Tennyson had returned to Arthurian myth as a way to reflect, or refract,

Victorian concerns with personal faith and faithlessness. Just one year before

Waterhouse painted his picture, Conrad had evoked old ships in an imperial con-

text in Heart of Darkness, having Marlow preface his tale by speaking of the Thames,

“crowded with memories of men and ships it has borne. . . . from the Golden Hind

returning with her round flanks full of treasure . . . to the Erebus and Terror, bound

on other conquests.” Emblematically, the book in front of Isolde turns into a globe

in the mirror’s reflection, as world and text intertwine.

xiv General Editor’s Preface

Reading and Listening

A important addition to our anthology’s resources is our new pair of audio CDs,

which can show students how literature has played out in the larger aural culture

of its times. Our CDs feature eloquent readings of poems and prose texts by such

actors as Richard Burton and Clare Bloom, and we have commissioned recordings

of several previously unrecorded works, particularly by recently rediscovered

women. We also present a range of modern authors reading their own writing,

from Tennyson and Yeats to Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, and Eavan Boland.

We also include a range of musical selections, both song settings of poems in

the anthology (such as Robert Burns’s beautiful A Red, Red Rose and his lusty,

satiric The Fornicator) and other music that develops themes and issues in the an-

thology. So, for example, we include the famous Purcell setting of If Music Be the

Food of Love, a poem that takes up Shakespeare’s theme only to turn it on its head.

Like the anthology itself, the CDs regularly group works in teachable clusters:

a speech by Queen Elizabeth on the sentencing of Mary, Queen of Scots is fol-

lowed by a selection from Thomas Tallis’s haunting Lamentations of Jeremiah, in

which Tallis—both a loyal servant of Elizabeth and a devout Catholic—mourns

Mary’s fall through the figure of Jerusalem, “once a queen of provinces, now sub-

ject to others.” On the second CD, stirring wartime speeches by Winston

Churchill, recorded by the BBC as he delivered them, lead into selections of post-

war poetry on themes of loss and endurance, including Sylvia Plath’s “Lady

Lazarus” with its startling use of Nazi imagery.

Individual tracks, and clusters of tracks, can be played in the classroom for a

variety of purposes: to illustrate the sound of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and

Middle Scots; to emphasize the intense drama of Shakespeare’s sonnets and

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues; to show directly the play of dialogue in

Wilde and in Shaw; and to stimulate discussion of the ways performance entails

interpretation. Students can also use the CDs as they study the works in the an-

thology. Most of the selections appear in the anthology itself; in some cases we

have also taken the opportunity to extend the anthology’s range by including a

compelling recording of a work not contained in the anthology, and in these cases

we include the text in the liner notes. So all these works can be studied as they are

heard. Finally, the CDs are a pure pleasure simply to listen to—a salutary reminder

of the degree to which literature is an art of the ear as much as it is a presence on

a printed page.

In Closing, a Poem

For all the worldliness of literary study today, we never want to forget the beauty

of literary language and the shaping force of literary form. One of the great plea-

sures of working on this anthology has been living so closely with so many beauti-

ful works. All of the editors can testify to the ways in which our teaching, our read-

ing, and our own writing have been invigorated by the process of work on our

anthology, and nothing pleases us more than when we hear from the book’s users

xvGeneral Editor’s Preface

that teaching from it has been similarly stimulating as well. It seems fitting to close

with a poem that William Chapman Sharpe was moved to write in the course of

long summer weeks of work on his period introduction as we prepared the first

edition. I had assured my co-editors, with a mixture of naivety and guile whose pro-

portions should perhaps be left unexplored, that this task would involve little

more than writing up an introductory lecture to a period survey course. It proved

to be much more, as you will find as you work with the period introductions and

the other editorial matter throughout the anthology. Bill’s experience crystallized

in the form of this poem:

Introduction to the Victorian Period

I bequeath days, weeks to it. The light

stains the windows sun-green, rainy office

gray. These are black-and-white people, written off

as history, profiles smeared by time. Their legacy

is inky mud, sepia and soot. Then one day, enterprise

and moral crisis bring them round. They nudge me

with their phobias and peccadilloes, afraid

to eat sex, drink Darwin, not wear black.

They beg me for some color, pale rose

for cheekbones, a blaze of prim teeth pearly

against tight lips–or maybe June dust gilded

with pollen on their riding clothes, an ankle

chafed red-raw by a stiff irreproachable boot.

I bend in their service, try to tint the crease-lines

of laughter, the unruly hair of ministers’ wives. But

they clamor for the whole box of crayons:

one has a favorite crimson ribbon, another eyes

bluer than death by cold, a third lost a child

who brightened only when his rainbow prism

danced faeries round the room. They importune

now by the dozens, they get up petitions, charter

trains, hire halls to fulminate in. Men break

ground for brooding monuments, women chain themselves

to the railings of my monochrome brain. What can

I do but promise to colorize their lives if they will only

stop their endless keening and make a poem

Edenic as a Morris print? It’s not enough. To ease

their gloom, they make me swear

to chromo mournful souls at Dover Beach,

retouch the yellowed shade of Robert Browning.

This poem expresses the engrossing quality that this project has taken on for all of

us during the years we have worked together on its first and now its second edi-

xvi General Editor’s Preface

tions. We expect that this new form of the anthology, revised in its selection of

works and in its visual and aural accompaniments, will continue to engross its

readers as well. It is certainly impossible to “cover” so much rich material in a sin-

gle course, but it may be possible to uncover it with some real success. This com-

panion volume can be a point of departure for the process of classroom explo-

ration and discovery; my heartiest welcome to all who now join in teaching with

the second edition of The Longman Anthology of British Literature.

—David Damrosch

xviiGeneral Editor’s Preface

Sample Syllabi

The purpose of this section is to offer some examples of effective approaches to dif-

ferent sorts of courses that can be taught with the anthology in its various versions.

Given here are a two-semester survey sequence using all six period volumes (or the

two big volumes); a one-semester survey using our Compact Edition; two cross-

period courses that use materials from two of the period volumes together; and two

focused treatments of particular themes or genres within a single period. Several

of the following syllabi have been contributed by adopters of the book, whose con-

tributions we gratefully acknowledge; others are syllabi developed by members of

our editorial board as we’ve taught from the anthology. We have revised the sam-

ple syllabi where appropriate to take account of the new offerings in our second

edition. Syllabi are presented here in summary form, for convenience, by week

rather than by individual class session, and without full listings in all cases of in-

dividual works assigned from an author. Instructors also often assign the period

introductions, and sometimes include individual author introductions on the syl-

labus as explicit assignments, though we don’t show this on these summary syllabi.

Each syllabus is accompanied by a version of its catalogue description or a com-

mentary by the instructor. We plan on expanding this section of sample syllabi in

the future, and would be very pleased to receive samples from anyone who would

like to share their approach to teaching with the full anthology or any of its com-

ponent parts. These should go to David Damrosch at the Department of English,

602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, or can be sent

electronically to dnd2@columbia.edu.

Page references in the following syllabi are to the starting page of a selection as

it appears in the second edition of the anthology, either volumes 1A–C or 2A–C,

as appropriate (or in the Compact Edition, in the case of the third sample syl-

labus). For the first two syllabi, items that can be heard on our audio CDs are la-

beled *CD.

1: A fall-semester survey of British literature, beginnings through theeighteenth century

Prof. Roxanne Kent-Drury, Northern Kentucky University.

Week 1: Introduction; Bede, 132; hyperlink to Caedmon’s Hymn, audio ver-

sion, with glosses. Wanderer, 150; Wife’s Lament, 154

Week 2: Beowulf; 27 (*CD); hyperlink to kennings in Beowulf

Week 3: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 192

xix

Week 4: Canterbury Tales: Prologue, 301 (*CD); Miller’s Tale, 321

hyperlink to modern translation of the selections

Week 5: “Vernacular Religion and Repression,” 514; Margery Kempe, 529

Week 6: Intro to Renaissance period and to sonnet form. Wyatt (*CD) and

Petrarch, 670; Sidney, 1043; Elizabeth I, 1078 (*CD)

Week 7: Shakespeare sonnets, 1225 (*CD)

Week 8: Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 1098; “Tracts on Women and

Gender,” 1496

Week 9: Metaphysical Poets: selections from Donne, 1647 (*CD), Herbert,

1685, Phillips, 1738

Week 10: Pepys, 2086 (*CD); poetic conversations between Rochester, 2280,

and Behn, 2130, and between Swift, 2370, and Montagu, 2568 (*CD)

Week 11: Behn, poems, 2213; Coterie Writing, 2224; Astell, Reflections upon

Marriage, 2357

Week 12: Behn, Oronooko

Week 13: Pope, Rape of the Lock; Essay on Criticism selection (*CD)

Week 14: Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, 2588 (*CD)

Week 15: Sheridan, School for Scandal, 2888

Professor Kent-Drury comments: The course is approximately half undergraduate

English majors and half students of other majors. In general, although I try to

expose students both to works and to forms they need as background to later

period courses, I avoid a monolithic “great books” approach and rely as well

upon providing “backgrounds” that highlight important cultural ideas. My

choices for the medieval period provide opportunities to analyze how

medieval ideas about religion, gender, heroism, etc. differ from those of the

present. Because of my classroom demographics, I elect not to teach a

Renaissance play; English majors will get a course in Shakespeare, whereas

teaching one Shakespeare play to non-majors is of doubtful value. Instead, I

teach the sonnet as reflective of a highly structured, hierarchical world view;

this also ensures students get some exposure to formal poetry. I am also in-

terested in literature as a conversation and discuss literature by Behn, Finch,

Leapor, Rochester, Swift, Montagu, Pope, and Gay. My overall philosophy is

that I can’t teach students everything about the periods of study, so I try to as-

sign works that provide insight into how people perceived their worlds and

the function of literature as an imaginative space for exploring and resolving

conflict. My teaching is informed by Jean Joseph Goux’s notion of “symbolic

economies”—that human institutions and relationships can be seen as negoti-

ated through parallel systems of exchange, including the political, social, gen-

dered, legal, religious, and monetary. Another concept I find important is

Raymond Williams’ idea of the “residual” and “emergent” in culture; this idea

provides a way to approach the “strange” and the “familiar” that coexist in any

work of literature.

xx Sample Syllabi

2: A spring-semester survey of British literature, nineteenth throughtwentieth centuries

Prof. Anne Fernald, Depauw University

[Course description]: 201 years in 41 days: this course needs to cover 4.8 years

every time we meet. Faced with such a task, we have to consider what is truly

important. This course focuses on a selection of the greatest, most exciting,

and most influential writing to come out of Britain since the French

Revolution. It will acquaint you with some of the major figures and works of

Romantic, Victorian, modernist, postmodern, postcolonial, and contemporary

literature in Britain, but it is more than just a road map or itinerary. Since we

will focus on only a few representative writers each week, there will be plenty

of opportunities for in-depth discussion. We will read plays, novels, short sto-

ries, nonfiction, selections from journals, some letters, and lots and lots of po-

etry. Through these many literary forms (and these many authors) we will de-

velop a sense of the literature, culture, and history of Britain in the last two

centuries. Themes and images—of nation and empire, of social class, of

women’s rights, of education, of capital, of the individual, of civic rights and

duties, of war, of religion, and of beauty—will appear, disappear, and re-emerge

transformed. Fifteen weeks from now, you will have a sense of both the breadth

and depth of English literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Week 1: Selections from “Perspectives: The Rights of Man and the

Revolution Controversy,” 56 (Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Paine) and from

“Perspectives: The Abolition of Slavery,” 159 (Equiano, Prince); Barbauld,

“Mouse’s Petition” (*CD); Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals,

478; William Wordsworth, several Lyrical Ballads, 337 (*CD)

Week 2: Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Immortality Ode, 454; Coleridge,

poems, 520; “Perspectives: The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the

Picturesque,” 496

Week 3: Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 754, “Ode to the West Wind, ” 771; Keats

poems and letters, 877 (*CD)

Week 4: “Perspectives: The Industrial Landscape,” 104; Dickens, Hard Times

(new Longman Cultural Edition)

Week 5: E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portugese, 1108, Aurora Leigh,

1112 (*CD); Tennyson, poems, 1146 (*CD); Arnold, “Dover Beach,” 1551

Week 6: Hopkins, several poems, 1679; Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” preface to

Dorian Gray, Aphorisms, De Profundis, 1864ff.; (*CD for Wilde and

Gilbert and Sullivan)

Week 7: Secret lives: Kipling, “Without Benefit of Clergy,” 1749; Stevenson,

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1821

Week 8: Yeats, poems, 2246 (*CD); Joyce, “Araby” and “The Dead,” 2274;

*CD for Joyce reading “Anna Livia Plurabelle”

xxiSample Syllabi

Week 9: “Vorticist Manifesto,” 2169, Rebecca West, “Indissoluble

Matrimony,” 2594, Wilfred Owen, poems, 2188, T. S. Eliot, “The Waste

Land,” 2356 (*CD)

Week 10: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 2386 (*CD)

Week 11: “Perspectives: Regendering Modernism” (Forster, Rhys), 2582;

D. H. Lawrence, poems and “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” 2640.

Week 12: Dylan Thomas, Return Journey, 2762; Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, 2771

Week 13: Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (separately ordered novel)

Week 14: Walcott, “The Fortunate Traveller,” 2951; Caryl Churchill, Cloud

Nine, 2839

3: A one-semester survey, beginnings through the twentieth century,using the Compact Edition

Prof. Anne Schotter, Wagner College

[Course description]: What constitutes the canon of English literature, and

who decides? What were the literary consequences of Britain’s complex colo-

nial past, starting as a land invaded and conquered (by Germanic tribes, the

Vikings, and the Normans), growing to be a world empire that colonized

others, and recently, losing the empire but leaving the English language to its

former subjects? In this long history of military conflict, what role did women

play? The themes of love and war and love as war will help to focus these

questions as we survey over a thousand years of British literature, reading such

classics as Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and Emma, as well as postcolonial writers such as

Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.

Week 1: Beowulf, 27; Judith, 94; “The Wanderer,” 104; “Wulf and Eadwacer,”

107; “The Wife’s Lament,” 108

Week 2: “Arthurian Myth and the History of Britain,” 109; Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight, 143

Week 3: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 220, Wife of Bath’s

Tale, 275

Week 4: Shakespeare, King Lear (Longman Cultural Edition)

Week 5: Donne, poems, 665 Lovelace, poems, 683; Marvell, “To His Coy

Mistress,” 677, “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return,” 691; Horace,

three Odes (xeroxed)

Week 6: Milton, selections from Paradise Lost, 785

Week 7: Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” 1165; Swift, “A Modest Proposal,”

1138

Week 8: “Perspectives: The Rights of Man” and Wollstonecraft, selections

from the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1471

Week 9: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Longman Cultural Edition)

Week 10: Poems by Blake, 1389, Wordsworth, 1520, and Shelley, 1702

Week 11: Poems by Keats, 1749, Tennyson, 1922, Browning, 1957, and

Arnold, 2020

xxii Sample Syllabi

Week 12: Poems by Wilfred Owen, 2301; Horace Ode III.2 (xerox); Eliot,

“The Waste Land,” 2425

Week 13: Two stories by Virginia Woolf, plus selections from A Room of One’s

Own, 2445; Joyce, “The Dead,” 2362

Week 14: Yeats, poems, 2327; “Perspectives: Whose Language?” selections

from Heaney, Ní Dhomhnaill, and Walcott, 2575ff.

4: A one-semester survey of medieval and early modern literature,using vols. 1A and 1B

Prof. Linda Troost, Washington and Jefferson College

Week 1: Early Irish verse, 111; Judith, 120; Dream of the Rood, 125; Beowulf, 27

Week 2: Gawain and the Green Knight, 192; Marie de France: Lanval, 179

Week 3: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: Prologue, 301; Wife of Bath, 337;

Pardoner, 384

Week 4: Second Play of the Shepherds, 488, and York Play of the Crucifixion, 507

Week 5: Middle English Lyrics, 549; Dunbar, Lament for the Makars; 588;

Malory, “The Day of Destiny,” 269; Late Medieval Allegory, 597: John

Lydgate and Christine de Pizan

Week 6: Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 1043, Spenser, Amoretti, 954; Faerie

Queene opening canto, 793

Week 7: Faerie Queene, continued

Week 8: Marlowe, Faustus, 1143; Shakespeare, sonnets, 1225;

Week 9: Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1292; “Perspectives: England in the New

World,” 1354

Week 10: Jonson, “To Penshurst,” 1630; Lanyer, “Description of Cookham,”

1093; Jonson, The Alchemist, 1530

Week 11: Mary Herbert, psalms, 1072; Donne, lyrics and Holy Sonnets,

1662; Herbert poems, 1686; Herrick, secular and religious poems, 1674,

Marvell lyrics, 1726

Week 12: Lecture on the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. Katherine

Phillips, “Upon the Double Murder of King Charles,” 1741; Marvell,

“Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” 1735; Milton,

early poetry, 1812

Week 13: Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 1–2, 1836

Week 14: Paradise Lost, selections from Books 4, 9, and 12. “Perspectives:

Spiritual Self-Reckonings,” 2029

Professor Troost comments: This course emphasizes the importance of the intel-

lectual climate of the past on a text. We try to read the works as someone from

the time might have read them and focus on issues that were central at the time

(as opposed to emphasizing issues that are central in our own time). Since

Christianity pervades British culture and politics, I have included a fair bit of

religious material so that the students get some grounding (I do not expect

them to know too much about medieval Roman Catholic doctrine). I have

xxiiiSample Syllabi

placed Anglo-Saxon religious poetry like “Judith” and “The Dream of the

Rood” before pagan heroic verse to drive home the point that the audience for

Beowulf was Christian. The medieval plays, Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, and

lyric poems lead us to the Everest of religious literature: Paradise Lost. I want

students to understand that the writers work within traditions, not vacuums,

so we consider European literary fashions and the English authors who write

in them. We study the Arthurian romance of the Gawain poet, Marie de

France, and Malory; the Petrarchan tradition developed in the love sonnets of

Sidney and Spenser; the Ruins-of-Time (as well as the anti-Petrarchan) tradition

developed in Shakespeare’s sonnets; neoclassical “imitation” in Donne (“The

Apparition”) and Jonson (“To Penshurst”), and metaphysical poetry (Donne

and Herbert). Finally, I wish to make clear to the students that literature adapts

itself to a changing society. We see drama reshape itself to accommodate polit-

ical and financial pressures, as well as respond to particular political events: the

conquest of the Spanish Armada (Doctor Faustus), for example. We see various

power bases depicted in poetry and drama: the landed (“To Penshurst,” “To

Cookham”) and the mercantile (The Canterbury Tales and The Alchemist) show-

ing us that the monarch’s court does not have the lock on patronage. The final

weeks of the course follow the contradictory impulses authors and audiences

grappled with during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the

Restoration. I finish with Paradise Lost, partly because of the wonderful mo-

mentum that teaching the work creates, but also because it pulls together the

many threads woven into the course.

5: A 10-week survey of medieval and early modern literature, usingvols. 1A and 1B

Prof. Renée Pigeon, California State University, Santa Barbara. First part of a three-

quarter sequence.

[Course description]: This course is a general introduction to English literature

from the early Middle Ages to 1640. Because it is a survey course encompass-

ing several centuries of literature, it allows students to sample some of the great

works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and to develop a broad sense

of the historical and intellectual context of the works read, providing the back-

ground necessary for more specialized study. The web page for this course is lo-

cated at http://mail.csusb.edu/~rpigeon/230.html.

Week 1: “The Wanderer,” 150; Beowulf, Introduction and lines 1–1883, pp. 27ff.

Week 2: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, 301; Miller’s Tale and

Merchant’s Tale (Coghill translation, Penguin discount)

Week 3: Canterbury Tales: Knight’s Tale; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 192

Week 4: Gawain continued; Marie de France, Lanval, 179; Dafydd ap

Gwilym, poems, 579

Week 5: Poems by Wyatt, 670, Raleigh, 1092, and Marlowe, 1124; Spenser,

Faerie Queene, Book 1, Letter & Cantos 1–2 (790)

xxiv Sample Syllabi

Week 6: Faerie Queene, continued

Week 7: Sidney, Arcadia, 1009; Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1225

Week 8: “Perspectives: Tracts on Women & Gender,” 1496; Whitney, poems,

1051; Jonson, poems, 1628

Week 9: Poems by Donne, 1648, Wroth, 1669, Herrick, 1674, Marvell, 1726

Week 10: Browne, from Religio Medici, 1767; Burton, from Anatomy of

Melancholy, 1771; Milton, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” sonnets, and selec-

tions from Areopagitica (1812–35)

6: A course focused on Victorian Poetry and Criticism, using Volume 2B

Prof. William Sharpe, Barnard College

[Course description]: This course is designed to explore the changing position

of poets and artists in modern society, and particularly their participation in

the construction of the elaborate gender roles and social codes we know today

as “Victorian.” Special emphasis will be given to the interaction between the vi-

sual arts, literature, and their social context.

Week 1: Poems by Tennyson, 1139; paintings by Millais and Hunt; drawings

from the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems

Week 2: Poems by Tennyson, including selections from Idylls of the King,

1196, and In Memoriam, 1165; photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron;

paintings by Morris, Burne-Jones, and others

Week 3: Robert Browning, poems, 1308

Week 4: Nightingale, “Cassandra,” 1498; selections from “Perspectives:

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen,” 1515; Mill, from The Subjection of

Women and “Statement Repudiating the Rights of Husbands” (1095)

Week 5: E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh (entire; Penguin discount)

Week 6: Aurora Leigh, continued, plus selected Sonnets from the Portuguese,

1108; Matthew Arnold, poems, 1550; selections from Clough in

“Perspectives: Religion and Science,” 1283

Week 7: Arnold, poems, 1550; selections from “The Study of Poetry,” 1593.

Slide lecture on pre-Raphaelitism and painting

Week 8: Dante G. Rossetti, poems, 1601. Pre-Raphaelitism and photography:

photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, C. L. Dodgson, and others;

photos of Jane Morris posed by Rossetti

Week 9: Christina Rossetti, poems, 1612. Illustrations by Dante Gabriel

Rossetti. William Morris, poems, 1634, Guenevere (painting), wallpaper

and fabric patterns, stained glass, furniture, book design

Week 10: Swinburne, poems, 1652

Week 11: Hopkins, poems, 1679. Walter Pater, from The Renaissance, 1665.

Visual Arts: Neo-classicism to Art Nouveau

Week 12: Whistler, from “Mr. Whistler’s ‘Ten O’ Clock’” in “Perspectives:

Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle,” 1945; paintings by

Whistler, including “Symphonies,” “Arrangements,” and “Nocturnes.”

xxvSample Syllabi

W. S. Gilbert, “If You’re Anxious for to Shine in the High Aesthetic

Line” (1943, and on CD)

Week 13: Wilde, poems and selections from “The Decay of Lying” and from

“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”; Preface to The Picture of Dorian

Gray, Aphorisms, excerpts from the trials (1862ff ). Selections from

“Perspectives: Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle” (Alfred

Douglas, Arthur Symons, “Michael Field,” etc)

Week 14: Bram Stoker, Dracula (separately ordered)

7: An upper-level course on “Modernism and Its Enemies,” usingVolume 2C:

Prof. David Damrosch, Columbia University

[Course description]: British modernism was less a movement than a series of

heated arguments. This course will explore the aesthetic and cultural stakes in

the radically varied constructions of modernity by such opposed figures as

Woolf versus Bennett, Barnes versus Woolf, Wilde versus Shaw, Kipling versus

Conrad, Conrad versus Wells, Eliot versus Hardy, Blast versus itself. Texts will

be The Longman Anthology of British Literature, volume 2C, plus three novels

(Wells, Tono-Bungay; Bennett, Riceyman Steps; Barnes, Nightwood). In addition, a

photocopied course pack will include essays, reviews, and letters by authors

commenting on one another.

1: Aestheticism, Decadence, and Realism

Week 1: Poems by Wilde, Douglas, Yeats, and Field; Kipling, “Without

Benefit of Clergy,” Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames” (all xeroxed; or avail-

able in vol 2B of the anthology)

Week 2: Wilde, preface to Dorian Gray; “The Decay of Lying”; Salomé

(coursepack)

Week 3: Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” 2018; Heart of

Darkness, 2020; Henry Morton Stanley on the Congo, 2076, Woolf on

Conrad (coursepack)

2: Conflicts: Class, Gender, and the Great War

Week 4: H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay; Wells on Conrad, James, and Bennett

(coursepack)

Week 5: Shaw, Pygmalion, 2085; P. G. Wodehouse, “Strychnine in the

Soup,” 2675

Week 6: Blast: Vorticist Manifesto, 2169, Rebecca West, “Indissoluble

Matrimony,” 2594. War poems by Hardy (2161), Brooke, Sassoon,

Rosenberg, and Owen (2183ff )

3: The Heights of Modernism

Week 7: Yeats, poems, 224; Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 2356; David Jones,

from In Parenthesis, 2195; Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 2790

xxvi Sample Syllabi

Week 8: Joyce, Dubliners stories, 2274, and “Nausicaa,” 2312. Forster,

“The Life to Come,” 2583; Rhys, “Mannequin,” 2626

Week 9: Essays pro and con: Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”

2374; Arthur Waugh, “Cleverness and the New Poetry,” 2350; Pound,

“Drunken Helots and Mr Eliot,” 2352; Lawrence, “Surgery for the

Novel—or a Bomb,” 2671; Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”

(coursepack); Bennett, reviews of the modern novel (coursepack)

Week 10: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 2386; excerpts from Diaries, 2535

Week 11: Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps (Penguin)

4: Afterechoes

Week 12: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (Faber, with Eliot’s preface)

Week 13: Joyce, selections from Finnegans Wake, 2338; Wyndham Lewis,

from Time and Western Man (coursepack); Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape,

2771, and “Texts for Nothing,” 2777

Week 14: Graham Greene, “A Chance for Mr Lever,” 2688; Caryl

Churchill, Cloud Nine, 2839

xxviiSample Syllabi