Dissenters and Believers: Romantics, Revolution, and Religions

Graduate

Intermittent This course examines the relation of Romantic writing to religion in the age of revolutions. We will read a number of Romantic-age writersWilliam Blake, S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Monk Lewis, Percy Shelley and #8212;in relation to the most "orthodox" religious modes (Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, and Evangelical) and the most "heterodox"Enthusiasm, Rational Dissent, Unitarianism, Deism, Pantheism, or atheism. We will also distinguish between "religions" (as formally institutionalized) and "religiosity"defining religiosity as more diffused or displaced feelings, ideas and practices that are often not clearly marked as religious or related to any one institutional religion. Two papers are required.