[ Schedule ]
Jan. 4 (Mon) : Re-defining Literature  
This lecture will describe how the word literature developed new meanings at the end of the eighteenth century. Professor Cronin will argue that the pressure to re-define the word came from a rapid and unprecedented expansion in the number of books published. A new need was felt to distinguish books of one kind from books of another kind, and to distinguish books of permanent value from books that exhausted their value at the moment of their publication. He will trace the consequences of these changes by drawing a comparison between the Lake Poets and Byron.
Jan. 5 (Tue) : Contesting the Literary
This lecture will begin with two fatal literary duels, and argue that these events properly represent a republic of letters remarkable for the acrimonious relationships between its citizens. Professor Cronin will argue that the acrimony had its origins in contested relationships, between the kind of writing that should be recognised as literature and the kind that should not, and between those who held that literature was writing produced by gentlemen without economic motives, and by those who recognised themselves as belonging to a newly emergent class of professional literary men.
Jan. 6 (Wed) : Jane Austen and the Literary Novel
Professor Cronin will give this lecture jointly with Dorothy McMillan, one of his departmental colleagues at Glasgow and a prominent scholar of Scottish Women¡¯s Literature. In many modern British bookshops the stock of novels is divided into two categories; general fiction and literary fiction. The lecture will argue that this distinction has its origins in the Romantic period, and that Jane Austen had a principal role in establishing it.
Jan. 7 (Thu) : The Romantic Cult of Heartlessness
Wordsworth was widely recognised as a poet of the heart. The major poem by one of Wordsworth¡¯s most devoted Victorian followers was appropriately entitled The School of the Heart. The appeal to the heart was one expression of an aesthetics of depth cultivated by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets the trace of which is still evident in much academic criticism. In this lecture Professor Cronin will trace in the post-Waterloo decades a determined reaction against literature of this kind, manifest in the production of writing that was associated with the city rather than the country, and with new modes of literary production and consumption, and that expressed itself in writing that flamboyantly displayed its own heartlessness.
Jan. 8 (Fri) : Masculinising Literature
This lecture will suggest that in the post-Waterloo years there was a concerted campaign to reclaim literature for men. In 1800 the three principal British novelists were all of them women. Walter Scott was the principal figure in a campaign to masculinise the novel, and Byron, especially in Don Juan, performed a similar role in poetry. The lecture will trace the reasons for and the consequences of this campaign. |
Ewha B.K. Research Grant. Ewha English Department.Ewha Institute for English and American Studies
