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How did William Wordsworth think differently in different verse forms? This series of seminars will explore the particular kinds of imaginative, philosophical and political experience which Wordsworth made available in blank verse, ballads, sonnets and odes, situating his original expressiveness in the context of other examples of Romantic poetry. We will also consider the relationship between a selection of Wordsworth¿s prose writings and his poetic practice to see how his theoretical thinking ramified in his verse craft and how his broader intellectual ideas were in turn modelled on his poetics.

This course will consider representations of disease from antiquity through the present-day, ranging from depictions of Biblical plagues, the Black Death, and Renaissance "pestilence," up through the cholera outbreaks of Victorian London, the global influenza of 1918, and the ongoing AIDS pandemic. In addition to reading literary works, we will dive into the archives to consider non-literary traces of disease, from "bills of mortality" to quack remedies, paintings, sermons, letters, diaries, government ordinances, and early medical texts.

Focus is on Shakespeare's Hamlet as a site of rich critical controversy from the eighteenth century to the present. Aim is to read, discuss, and evaluate different approaches to the play, from biographical, theatrical, and psychological to formalist, materialist, feminist, new historicist, and, most recently, quantitative. The ambition is to see whether there can be great literature without (a) great (deal of) criticism. The challenge is to understand the theory of literature through the study of its criticism.

A close study of Shakespeare's English history plays and their influence on the romantic history plays of Schiller, Victor Hugo, and others.

This course is interdisciplinary: a methods course (in book history), a history course, and a literature course. The major cultural changes that took place in Europe between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century are studied through direct and detailed examinations of printed objects from the Stanford collections. The course will be taught with John Mustain, the curator of early printed books at the Stanford Libraries.

This course will bring together the disciplines of history and literary studies by looking closely at the work of one major twentieth-century author: the British writer and political polemicist George Orwell. In 1946, Orwell writes, "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art." In these years, Orwell writes about-- and often participates in or witnesses first-hand--a series of major events and crises. These include British imperialism in Burma, urban poverty in Europe, class inequality in England, the conflict between Socialism and Fascism in Spain, and the rise of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. In engaging all of these events, Orwell experiments with different literary forms, moving between fiction and non-fiction, novel and autobiography, essay and memoir, manifesto and fable, literature and journalism. Few writers demand such sustained and equal attention to text and context: in this course we will move back-and-forth between Orwell's varied writing and the urgent social and political contexts it addresses.

A slow and careful reading of Herman Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. In the process, we will unfold the novel's nineteenth-century literary-historical context as well as the world of Melville's own literary, religious, philosophical, technological, commercial, and scientific citations and allusions. We will seek to understand the multiple significances of Melville's experiments with the novelistic genre and their relationship with his building out the meaning of Americanness. In the second half of the quarter, we will focus on a selection of major mid-twentieth-century through contemporary critical, literary-theoretical, and political-theoretical readings of Moby-Dick.