Global Romanticism

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Some of the most enduring stereotypes of British Romanticism involve the cultivation of solitary genius, the return to a pristine Nature, and the celebration of local, rural community. Compelling as these cultural ideals may seem, they have been complicated and enriched by recent scholarship that situates the literary productions of Romanticism within the larger geopoitical frameworks of their historical epoch: such as Britain's colonial enterprise, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, worldwide commercial systems, the transatlantic slave trade, travel and exploration. To become alert to the interaction of these global forces with the period's literary activity is to develop a new,complex appreciations of multiple forms of "Romanticisms" operating and clashing together in relation to rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world developments. This class will explore the intersection of the local, the national, and the global in well-known canonical writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys as well as woks by such lesser-known figures as Bailie, Smith, Yearsley, Morgan, Cowley, and Starke. Readings and discussion will range generically across fiction, drama, poetry, life writing, abolitionist literature, and political prose.