ENGL2791: Romantic Plays and Players

• At least one of the following modules: Introduction to Drama (ENGL1011), Introduction to the Novel (ENGL1061), Introduction to Poetry (ENGL1071).

• Any other 20 credit lecture module in English Studies.

• None.

• To explore Romantic-period texts, performances, and performativity by ranging widely across a variety of performance sites, genres, and topics.
• To introduce students to the relevant debates about Romantic-period theatre history and performance, and to key digital resources such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO); Eighteenth-Century Drama (AM Digital); and LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection.
• To investigate the broader socio-political context of contemporary theatregoing and understand the formative influence of the theatre on Romantic literature more generally.
• To interrogate the varied theoretical and methodological approaches to research undertaken by scholars and practitioners of drama, theatre and performance, including use of the archives, critical reading and contextual study.
• To understand and contest the boundary between drama, theatre and performance, and promote critical enquiry into theatre historiography.
• To consider the textual, visual, and material cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century playhouses, examining the intersection of written, pictorial and other forms of evidence (including theatrical biographies, newspaper reviews, playbills, songbooks, portraiture and satirical prints).

• Embraces a broad range of dramatic literature, including major authors, such as William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as lesser-known authors, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and Charles Dibdin the Younger.
• Addresses a range of topics, including theatre and war; subjectivity; the rise of the professional review; the development of new acting styles; stage censorship; canonical vs minor plays; gender; celebrity; entrepreneurship; popular culture; and the theatre's relationship to other forms of spectacular entertainment.
• Introduces, develops and challenge assumptions about the "literary" and "popular".
• Focuses on the political and aesthetic axes of performance, with particular reference to questions of spectatorial agency, impact and authority.
• Combines close-readings of specific texts with attention to the period's historical and intellectual contexts, including revolutionary, imperial and sexual ideologies.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will gain detailed knowledge and understanding of the literary, economic, social and political cultures of the Romantic-period stage, and the relations between these cultures.
• Students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with relevant historical and intellectual contexts for understanding Romantic-period theatre and performance.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the essay may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before the first assessed essay, students have an individual 15-minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points, relevant to the essay, and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

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