English Literature of the Romantic Period

3 units

This course will focus on the most important writing of the Age of Romanticism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. An era that emerged from the Enlightenment, it was galvanized by the French Revolution and its repurcussions in Ireland and elsewhere, and ended (long before the death of Wordsworth) with the victory of a conservatism epitomized by the leading theorist of beauty and the sublime, the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke. Along with such topics as the Romantic sublime (and the uncanny), we will consider the Romantic writer's fascination with the interior self, daemonic models of Creation and creativity, and the vicissitudes of the melancholic poet in the changing public sphere. Our focus will be the poetry and prose of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--giving due attention to the longer works of these major poets--but we will also look at the writing that emerged at this time from the geographic and cultural margins of the two islands. Of particular interest will be the ways in which our ongoing efforts to define "British Romanticism" in the 20th and 21st centuries have led--even when they have failed to circumscribe adequately that elusive object--to some of the most vital and controversial approaches to the study of literature in our time, from modernist reaction to the Romantic lyric to the recuperation of Romanticism for Cold War America (Abrams and Bloom) to the deconstructive practice of Paul de Man and his successors. Most recently we are witnessing a revival of the nature school of Romantic poetry, particularly of the work of John Clare, that coincides with ecological approahces to literary study.