Romantic Landscapes in Literature and Painting
Spring 2007, Thurs. 9:10-12:00
Dr. Joseph Murphy, Office: SF229, Email: 041845@mail.fju.edu.tw
Overview. This course will explore landscape aesthetics in English and American
literature (primarily poetry, essays, and short stories) and painting, with special emphasis
on the Romantic tradition. Its primary interest is in Romanticism as a period of transition
between eighteenth-century and modernist landscape aesthetics. Throughout, our
concerns will be the epic status of landscape in Romanticism; landscape, ideology, and
history; landscape, childhood, and autobiography; country, city, and modernization;
nature, gardens, and parks; and relationships between verbal and visual representation.
Part One samples ideas of the pastoral, the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful,
from the classical age through the late eighteenth century. Part Two turns to the
landscapes of English Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and John Clare, and of
painters Constable and Turner. Part Three crosses the Atlantic to view landscapes in
fiction and poetry by earlier nineteenth-century American writers and in paintings by the
Hudson River School. Part Four examines the landscape visions of the Transcendentalists
Emerson and Thoreau, of Whitman and Dickinson, and of the Luminist painters. Finally,
we will locate various strains of Romantic landscape aesthetics at work in a modernist
novel, Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1916). Requirements include class discussion, two
presentations, a short essay, and a final essay.
Texts.
Willa Cather, My Antonia.
Copied selections and online texts.
Online painting resources.
Requirements and Grading
Short Essay
Final Essay
Presentations and class participation
20%
50%
30%
Two PowerPoint presentations (20 min. each): One presentation introducing a work of
literature and one introducing some paintings assigned for one class period. Introduce
key issues, focus on some important details, and raise some questions for discussion.
Class participation. Read and prepare the texts assigned for each class meeting before
the beginning of class. Also view and study the assigned paintings online before each
class meeting. I will email the URLs for these paintings to each of you in advance.
Romantic Landscapes in Literature and Painting
2
Tentative Schedule
Note: Readings may be added.
Date
Topics/Assignments
3/01 UNIT 1: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND THE SISTER ARTS
Introduction
Alexander Pope, from Epistles to Several Persons
William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,
1802”
Emily Dickinson, [There’s a certain Slant of light]
Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of a Jar”
3/08
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, from Laocoon
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, Part I. Sec. VII. Of the Sublime; Part III, Sec. XXVII.
The Sublime and Beautiful Compared
Pope, from Epistles to Several Persons
John Dixon Hunt, “Emblem and Expression in the Eighteenth-Century
Landscape Garden.” Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of
Landscape Architecture (1991), 75-102.
Painters: Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa
3/15
James Thomson, "Celadon and Amelia" Episode from "Summer" in The
Seasons
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/unlocked/thomson_james/celadonand-amelia.html
The Picturesque
William Gilpin, “On Picturesque Beauty”
Uvedale Price, “Essay on the Picturesque,” Chapter 3
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/price3.htm
Richard Payne Knight, from “The Landscape, A Didactic Poem”
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/unlocked/knight_richard_payne/thelandscape.html
Painters: Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner
Romantic Landscapes in Literature and Painting
3/22
3
UNIT 2: ENGLISH ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE
William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,”
“The Two April Mornings,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Nutting,”
“The Ruined Cottage”
Dorothy Wordsworth, from The Grasmere Journals
Alan Liu, "The Locodescriptive Moment.” Wordsworth: The Sense of History
(1989), 115-28.
William K. Wimsatt, Jr. “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery.”
Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Norton, 1970.
77-88.
3/29
Wordsworth, “Michael”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” "This Limetree Bower, My
Prison"
John Clare, “The Moors,” “Pastoral Poesy,” “Wood Pictures in Spring”
John Lucas, “Places and Dwellings: Wordsworth, Clare and the AntiPicturesque.” The Iconography of Landscape. Ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen
Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 83-97.
4/05 No class
4/12
UNIT 3: AMERICAN SCENERY
Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery”
William Cullen Bryant, “To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe,”
Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia, [Natural Bridge]
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Visit to Niagara”
Lydia Sigourney, “Niagara”
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, Ch. 1 [Niagara]
Edgar Allen Poe, “Descent in the Maelstrom”
Painters: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, George Inness,
Frederic Edwin Church
4/19
Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” “The Prairies”
Hawthorne, “Sights from a Steeple,” “The Great Stone Face,” “The Ambitious
Guest,” “Ethan Brand,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial”
4/26
UNIT 4: TRANSCENDENTALIST LANDSCAPES
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; “Each and All”
Romantic Landscapes in Literature and Painting
5/03
4
Thoreau, Walden, Ch. 5. “Solitude”; Ch. 16. “The Pond in Winter”; Ch. 17.
“Spring”
Painters: Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane
5/10 Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,”
“A Song of the Rolling Earth,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “As I Ebb’d with
the Ocean of Life,” “The City Dead-House,” “Sparkles from the Wheel,” “A
Farm Picture,” “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” “There Was a Child
Went Forth”
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”
Joseph C. Murphy, “Distant Effects: Whitman, Olmsted, and the American
Landscape.” Mickle Street Review: An Online Journal of Whitman and
American Studies 17/18 (2005)
http://www.micklestreet.rutgers.edu/pages/Scholarship/Murphy.htm.
5/17 Emily Dickinson, poems to be announced
Barton Levi St. Armand, “Lone Landscapes: Dickinson, Ruskin, and Victorian
Aesthetics. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (1984), 21958
John Ruskin, “Of the Turnerian Picturesque.” Modern Painters, IV (1856)
5/24
UNIT 5: FROM ROMANTIC TO MODERNIST LANDSCAPE
Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”
Willa Cather, My Antonia
5/31
My Antonia
6/07
My Antonia
6/14
My Antonia