Romantic Peotry

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The turn of the nineteenth century, also known as the Age of Revolution, saw deep cultural, political and economic changes in Western society, which caused equally deep and long-lasting innovations in the understanding of the self as a liberated individual in a necessary relationship with nature and a political whole. These changes are reflected in, or sometimes anticipated by, the literature of the time. Famous for its poetry, the Romantic period also saw the publication of ground-breaking novels, political pamphlets, essays, memoirs and other texts destined to radically alter the idea of literature, committing to individual self-expression and a breaking of any imposed aesthetic or formal rule. The purpose of this course is to introduce the students to one of the most innovative and paradigm-changing periods in literature through the study of the ongoing interplay between cultural contexts and individual work during the Romantic period. This is a reading and writing intensive course. Students in 300-level literature classes are required to produce 5-6,000 words of critical writing.