British Romantic Literature

Catalog description

In this course students will study British Romanticism as a major intellectual, literary, and cultural movement, reading the works of the major writers of that period. Although the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1789 traditionally marks the beginning of the English Romantic period, several English writers had already been demonstrating impulses that would be then be more formalized by writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The course themes will include: the Romantic ideas about nature, revolution and democratic government, the dominance of feelings and emotion over reason and logic, the importance of the common man, how art and literature should reflect the natural world, and how traditional literary forms were stretched and transformed into new modes of expression during the British Romantic period. Prerequisite: ENG501, ENG520.