British Romantics in Italy: description
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Prof. Angela Esterhammer,
Prof. Christoph Bode
Our seminar will focus on some British Romantics – most notably Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley – and their relationships to Italy, and to Venice in particular, as they are reflected in their dramatic, poetic and prose works. There will be preparatory meetings during the winter semester, but the bulk of the course will be taught at Venice International University, March 10 to 14, 2008. The course will be co-taught by Professor Dr. Angela Esterhammer of Zürich University, an expert on British Romanticism of international renown. The primary texts we'll analyse and discuss are BYRON: Canto IV of Childe Harold
Beppo
Marino Faliero
"The Prophecy of Dante"
P.B. SHELLEY: Julian and Maddalo
The Cenci
"Ode to the West Wind"
"Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills"
(a knowledge of Shelley's essay A Defence of Poetry is generally presupposed.)
MARY SHELLEY: The Last Man
The first of our preparatory meetings will be on October 16th, 2007. The dates of the other two preparatory meetings will be announced in due time, but they will always be Tuesday nights at the official course time. During these three meetings we will not only discuss technical matters, but also make ourselves familiar with the biographical and historical backgrounds to the literary texts we'll be reading. As preparation for this course it is not only necessary that all the primary texts mentioned above be read, but participants should also consult reference works like Iain McCalman's An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age or Michael O'Neill's Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998). This latter book will also guide students to all the relevant secondary sources and tell them about the different scholarly editions that we have of our three writers. For the purpose of this seminar participants are asked to copy their Byron texts from Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, new edition corrected by John Jump, OUP, 1970, but they should also make use of the notes and critical apparatus of the standard edition of Byron's works, which is Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 Vols., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980-93. Our edition for P.B. Shelley's texts is Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, and for Mary Shelley's novel we use the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition. As biographies we can recommend Leslie A. Marchand's Byron: A Portrait, for P.B. Shelley, Richard Holmes' Shelley, The Pursuit, while for Mary Shelley, Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality and Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley make interesting reading. Extracts from Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author and from Thomas Moore's Notes on Byron's Life in Italy will be placed in the library so that they can be photocopied. 
Every participant will have to prepare a 20 to 25 minutes' oral presentation (Referat) and write an additional term paper before or after the seminar. Some places in this seminar will be reserved for students from Zürich University, who will be selected by Professor Angela Esterhammer. If two or more students are interested in the same topic, it will obviously be necessary to coordinate interests and workloads – but we are sure this can be done electronically. 
