Petzold, Jochen

In the United Kingdom, the 1840s were marked by widespread famine, high
unemployment, and intense political unrest, significantly impacting the
lives of the working class and the poor – and hence the period became
known as the “Hungry Forties”. In this seminar, aimed at students doing
either History or English/British Studies, or who combine both subjects,
we will explore some of the historical developments that led to the
fateful combination of high food prices, high unemployment and
challenging housing conditions, and we will discuss the political
responses they elicited. These includes developments such as the Great
Irish Famine, the struggle about the Corn Laws, the application of a new
Poor Law or waves of social unrest and political activism where a
movement such as Chartism emerged. The severe social conditions also led
to a wide range of cultural responses, most prominently the so-called
“condition of England novel”.

By combining approaches from historical and cultural studies, we aim to
uncover the complex interplay between economic policies, social
conditions, and cultural responses, and how these shaped the trajectory
of 19th-century British society.

 

Invented in Sicily in mid-13^th
century, the sonnet rose to fame and immense popularity throughout Europe
during the renaissance, mainly due to Francesco Petrarca’s poems to Laura. It
came to England comparatively late: courtiers at the court of Henry VIII
brought this type of poetry back from travels on the continent, and started
writing sonnets in English in the 1530s. The immediate impact seems not to have
been a big one, but towards the end of the century, a veritable
sonneteering-craze gripped English poets, and a wave of sonnet-sequences swept
the land. By the time William Shakespeare published his sonnets, in 1609, this
wave was practically over, although poets continued to write sonnets well into
the 17^th century.

In this seminar, we will look at key
stages in the “Rise of the Sonnet”: first attempts by Wyatt and the Earl of
Surrey, the early sequences by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s Sonnets will of course be discussed, and
we will end with the first amatory sonnet sequence written by a woman, Lady
Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilantus.

This course will offer an overview of British literary (and cultural) history, from Old English epic to the ‘internationalisation’ of ‘English literature’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It will put literary developments into a broader historical framework that includes political events and their cultural ramifications.