What we now call Romanticism—that brief explosion of literary, cultural, and political change that began with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended in the 1820s—may well constitute the most momentous period in British literary history. A wide range of political movements arguably find their genesis in these tumultuous decades, including radicalism, abolitionism, and environmentalism. Many familiar ideas about literature and the arts emerged during this time as well, as did many of the frameworks through which we understand our own possibilities for social change. In this course we’ll study the literature of the Romantic period and explore the relation between its political dreams and its poetic innovations. We’ll be particularly interested in how writers respond to the failure of the French Revolution and develop different formal and rhetorical strategies with which to re-imagine or critique its unfulfilled promises of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, especially considering the persistence of slavery, patriarchy, and class-based inequality. We’ll also be interested in how works that appear to have little to do with politics nevertheless register discontent with things as they are and a desire for things to be otherwise. While our primary readings will be drawn from the Romantic period, the course will define Romanticism as a poetics that continues to be relevant in the contemporary world. Accordingly, students will be asked to make connections between these readings and more recent literary and cultural texts.

Authors include Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth.