Module description
The French Revolution Effect: Italy, Germany, Greece This module will examine literary responses to the French Revolution, focusing in particular on the Revolution’s explosive outward radiation in the first half of the nineteenth century. By investigating France’s ‘sister republics’ in the continent, students are invited to reflect on the transmission of revolutionary ideas and their imposition, appropriation or rejection in different national contexts. Particular attention will be given to new concepts of time and of the future: the French Revolution made real the Enlightenment concept that the future will be nothing like the past, and that deliberate political plans can bring about radical changes in human affairs. Often, however, the metaphors employed to describe this type of transformations were linked to violent, uncontrollable, and even inhuman phenomena such as earthquakes, explosions, and volcanic eruptions.
Drawing on literature, philosophy, and political discourse, this course asks how European countries on the brink of national emancipation and unification engaged with ideas of modern, manmade change promoted by the Revolution and, in some cases, physically ‘exported’ through military action. Moreover, we will ask why and how Enlightenment’s expectations about the future were displaced by Romantic recuperations of the past in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Students taking this module will examine literary representations of the events in France and of societies constantly living in fear or hope of a new revolution. Italy’s paradoxical position will be highlighted as both the originator of an exemplary republicanism for nineteenth-century revolutionaries, and a nation unable to emancipate itself in the present. The German experience of Revolution will be examined through the moral quandaries posed by the Terror about what can be sacrificed to realize revolutionary aspirations. Finally, Greece is the most striking example of crossed temporalities in a revolutionary age. The Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire re-enacted the ancient battle between ‘European’ freedom and Asian despotism – its success galvanized liberals everywhere. Primary readings will include works by P.B. Shelley, Hölderlin, Foscolo, Solomos and Stendhal. Texts can be read in the original or in an English translation.
Assessment details
1 x 4,000 word essay (100%); coursework reassessment in exam period 3
Educational aims & objectives
This module will examine literary responses to the French Revolution, focusing in particular on the Revolution’s explosive outward radiation in the first half of the nineteenth century. By investigating France’s ‘sister republics’ in the continent, students are invited to reflect on the transmission of revolutionary ideas and their imposition, appropriation or rejection in different national contexts.
Italy’s paradoxical position is highlighted as both the originator of an exemplary republicanism for nineteenth-century revolutionaries, and a nation unable to emancipate itself. The German experience of Revolution is examined through the moral quandaries posed by the Terror about what can be sacrificed to realize revolutionary aspirations. Finally, Greece is the most striking example of crossed temporalities in a revolutionary age. The Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire re-enacted the ancient battle between ‘European’ freedom and Asian despotism – its success galvanized liberals everywhere.
Students taking this module will examine both literary representations of the events in France and of societies constantly living in fear or hope of a new revolution. Primary readings will include works by P.B. Shelley, Hölderlin, Foscolo, Solomos and Stendhal. Texts can be read in the original or in an English translation.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to:
- Critically review the process by which revolutionary ideas and discourse were transmitted to different national contexts in nineteenth-century Europe
- Evaluate a range of literary responses to the French Revolution in a comparative perspective
- Reflect critically on key ideas that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and continue to inform today’s global politics, including ‘revolution’, ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’, and ‘nation’
- Assess the role of literature, with its emphasis on emotions and intentions, in shaping our understanding of history
Teaching pattern
Two hours per week
Suggested reading list
- Bainbridge, Simon, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict, (Oxford UP, 2004).
- Beiser, Frederick, Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism (Harvard UP, 1992).
- Beaton, Roderick and David Ricks (eds), The making of modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism and the uses of the past (1797-1896) (Ashgate, 2009).
- Blix, Göran, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (U o Pennsylvania P, 2009).
- Buckley, Matthew S., Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006).
- Cronin, Richard, The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Macmillan, 2000).
- Duggan, Christopher, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (Allen Lane, 2007).
- Fontana, Biancamaria, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge UP, 1994).
- Güthenke, Constanze, Placing modern Greece: the dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770 1840 (Oxford UP, 2008).
- Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia UP, 2004).
- Miller, Mary Ashburn, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Cornell UP, 2011).
- Patriarca, Silvana and Lucy Riall (eds),The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- Perovic, Sanja, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge UP, 2012).
- Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge UP, 2007).
- Starobinski Jean, The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789 (Rizzoli, 1987).
- Viroli, Maurizio, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, (Oxford UP, 1995).