The Romantic Novel: The 1790s

3 ch (3C) · Undergraduate

Focuses on novels shaped by the French Revolution; debates about rights and reform; and anxieties surrounding gender, class, and national identity. Studying works by writers such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, the course examines how fiction engaged with these turbulent contexts and articulated emerging Romantic concerns, including emotion, imagination, subjectivity, and the limits of Enlightenment rationalism. It also explores the novel’s relationship to poetry, political writing, and the Gothic.