ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism, 1789-1832

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Study of British literature in a time of revolution. Authors may include such poets as Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats; essayists such as Burke, Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt, Lamb, and DeQuincey; and novelists such as Edgeworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, and Scott.

Topic for 2017/18b: The Age of Romanticism: Revolution and Rebellion. This course surveys the literature of the Romantic period through the lens of revolution and rebellion, both of which characterize this period in British history in a number of ways. Across the English Channel, French civilians were overthrowing their monarchy; revolutions in science and technology were catapulting Europe into the industrial era; English poets were rebelling against what they perceived to be the antiquated poetic forms of the eighteenth century; and prose writers were producing some of the original human rights manifestos, calling for women’s empowerment and the abolition of the British slave trade. Paying close attention to these historical and political contexts, we will examine how writers of the period mobilized the concept of revolution in their literary works and used it as an impetus for experimentation, on both thematic and formal levels. Surveyed poets include William Blake, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, William Cowper, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats; fiction writers include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and John Polidori; and prose writers include Edmund Burke, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Prince and Mary Wollstonecraft. Kathleen Gemmill.

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