123222 SE Literature Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2017S)

“[W]ith this key [i.e. his sonnets] Shakespeare unlocked his heart”: Poetry theory has long been grappling with the lyric speaker, with disputes centring on the exact role to be assigned to the biographical author figure. In this course we will discuss both historical and modern theories of the lyric and their diverse approaches to the lyric subject. Retracing the late eighteenth-century revolution in philosophy and aesthetics, we will contextualize Romantic poetry and its influential views on selfhood. While the majority of texts analysed will be taken from the Romantic era, we will also be looking at later examples of autodiegetic poetry, including performance poetry and song lyrics from the immediate present.