We see into the life of things: Forms of Romanticism

Catalog description

This course will offer a survey of ten major Romantic writers who published between the 1780s and 1820s, and of their innovations in four key genres: poetry, life-writing (including both travel-writing and autobiography), essays, and the novel. These texts variously appeared as strange, absurd, trivial, alarming and even revolutionary to their first readers, and this course will seek to recapture the artistic, imaginative, social, political and philosophical ferment which inspired the Romantics and which they hoped would reanimate and refocus their contemporaries at a time of remarkable socio-political change.