Romantic Detail

This course reads a variety of literary and visual texts from the romantic archive that provide a staging ground for the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the detail. We will explore how a detail can move from part to whole, inconsequence to consequence, revelation and reticence, as well as become a sign of gender difference, sexual dissidence, and racial ambiguity. How do formal questions around lyric expression and novelistic narrative relate to the detail? Writers will include Bronte, Clare, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth.