Speculative Futures in the Shelley Circle

John reading lists, syllabus,

Speculative Futures in the Shelley Circle

A Winter 2020 graduate course at the University of Waterloo; draft reading list updated 8 December 2019

Course Description

Percy Shelley’s experimental poems and Mary Shelley’s speculative fictions are committed to the rhetorical value of imagining radically different futures, from political utopia to ecological disaster. This course will examine works such as The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, Frankenstein, and The Last Man in two different ways: theoretically, as an engagement with an array of recent approaches to the “speculative;” and historically, as an entry point into Romantic theories of social change, on subjects including imperialism; techno-futurism; nonviolent protest; animal rights and vegetarianism; and the future of the planet (variously imagined as sustainable paradise or mass extinction).

Course Texts

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd (Norton), 9780373977523
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview), 9781554811038
  • Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Broadview), 9781551110769

Schedule of Meetings:

  • 6 Jan, Week 1: Introductions
    • PBS, “To Wordsworth” (1816);* “Ozymandias” (1818)*
    • MS, “On Reading Wordsworth’s Lines on Peele Castle” (1825/unpublished)*
    • Emily Rohrbach, from Modernity’s Mist*
  • 13 Jan, Week 2: Theories of Progress and Decline
    • Excerpts from Godwin and Wollstonecraft (in Frankenstein Appendix A)
    • PBS, Queen Mab cantos 1 and 9 (1813)
    • MS, “The Mortal Immortal” (1833)
    • Secondary: Jonathan Sachs, from The Poetics of Decline;* Greg Ellermann, “A Poetics of Ether”*
  • 20 Jan, Week 3: Speculative Philosophy
    • PBS, “Alastor” (1815/1816); “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc” (1816/1817); “To a Skylark” (1821)
    • Secondary: Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said;”* Evan Gottlieb, “Shelley, Nihilism, and Speculative Materialism”*
  • 27 Jan, Week 4: Speculative Fiction 1—Reimagining Human Nature
    • MS, Frankenstein vols 1-2 (1816-17; 1818)
    • Frankenstein Appendix B: Darwin, Davy
    • PBS, from “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (1813)*
    • Secondary: Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”*
  • 3 Feb, Week 5: Speculative Fiction 2—Gothic Pasts, Gothic Futures
    • MS, Frankenstein vol 3
    • Polidori, “The Vampyre” (1816/1819), in Frankenstein Appendix G
    • Byron, “Darkness” (1816), in Last Man Appendix A
    • Secondary: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “1816: The Year without a Summer”
  • 10 Feb, Week 6: Gothic Futures, continued: Doubles, Displacement, and Fragmentation
    • MS, excerpt from Matilda (1819/unpublished);* from Winter, ed., Mary Shelley’s Gothic Tales in The Keepsake: “Ferdinando Eboli” (1829); “Transformation” (1831); “The Invisible Girl” (1833); review “The Mortal Immortal” (1834)
    • Secondary: Catherine Spooner, “Cosmo-Gothic: The Double and the Single Woman;”* Diane Long Hoeveler, “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal’”*
  • Reading Week – no class on 17 Feb
  • 24 Feb, Week 7: Political Prophecy
    • PBS, “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819); “Ode to the West Wind” (1819); “England in 1819” (1819); “Defence of Poetry” (1821/1840)
    • Secondary: James Chandler, “History’s Lyre,” in Norton 711-22; Susan Wolfson, “Poetic Form and Political Reform,” in Norton 722-35
  • 2 Mar, Week 8: Future Visions 1: Regenerative Visions
    • PBS, Prometheus Unbound (1820)
    • Secondary: Timothy Webb, “The Unascended Heaven,” in Norton 694-711; Chris Washington, “The Mind Is Its Own Place: What Percy Shelley’s Mountain Did Not Say”*
  • 9 Mar, Week 9: Future Visions 2: Reform and Disaster
    • MS, The Last Man (pub. 1826), first half (p. 1-170, i.e. thru ch 14)
    • PBS, “Preface” to Hellas (1821)
    • Secondary: Alan Bewell, from Romanticism and Colonial Disease*
  • 16 Mar, Week 10: Extinction
    • MS, The Last Man (pub. 1826), second half (p. 170-367)
    • Elizabeth Effinger, “A Clandestine Catastrophe: Disciplinary Dissolution in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man”*
  • 23 Mar, Week 11: Unfinished Gestures
    • MS, “The Choice” (1823/unpublished), in Last Man Appendix E
    • PBS, “The Triumph of Life” (1822/1824)
    • Secondary: Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Growing Old Together: Lucretian Materialism in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life;”* Andrea Charise, “Introduction” to The Aesthetics of Senescence*
  • 30 Mar, Week 12: Conference-style workshop of final papers in progress; final roundup discussion

Additional Resources 

Web:

Reserves:

  • Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (1987)
  • Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002)
  • Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1982)
  • Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007)
  • Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (1988)
  • Jerrold Hogle, Shelley’s Process (1988)
  • William Keach, Shelley’s Style (1984)
  • Anne C. McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (2018)
  • Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988)
  • Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (1994)
  • Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Ltd.: Romanticism and Adjustment (2015)
  • Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (2016)
  • Michael Eberle Sinatra, ed., Mary Shelley’s Fictions (2000)
  • William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (1991)
  • Washington and McCarthy, eds, Romanticism and Speculative Realism (2019)
  • Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971)