British Romantic Poetry

Catalog description

This course focuses on one of the most remarkable periods of creativity in English literary history that signaled the decline of old feudal structures and ushered in an era of individualism, political revolution, and democratic values. Paradoxically, it also ended up generating a sense of revolutionary elitism and notions of artistic autonomy and cultural superiority that came to represent an important feature of European, and, of course, British, imperialism. Romantic writers, in turn, were heavily influenced by the Orient and freely appropriated its texts, aesthetics, and themes even as they satirized its mores and manners. In this course we shall trace the genesis of the Romantic movement in the reaffirmation of feeling and emotion over the classical (and Enlightenment) values of reason and restraint and study the relationship of the writers and their works to nature, imagination, and folklore, as also to political and cultural changes in England and to the grand design of empire building that was in full swing at this time. Course texts may include writings by, among others, William Jones, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, Anna Barbauld, William Blake, Hannah More Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Byron, the Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Counts toward post-1800 requirement.