Full syllabus here.
This course surveys primarily British literature from approximately 1787 to the 1830s – that is, from the French and Haitian Revolutions to the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign – including the literary and intellectual trends of Romanticism in European and imperial context. The course will zoom out to frame Romanticism in a worldwide context by considering its relationships to imperialism and chattel slavery, as well as writers who were not counted in the “canon” of the period until recently. We will consider aesthetic issues of form and genre, topics of enduring importance such as gender and race, and the ambiguities of the reception of British Romanticism by readers of color and Indigenous readers.
The goals of this course are
- to introduce students to British and anglophone literary and cultural expression of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction
- to encourage students to refine their analytical, interpretive, argumentative, and creative skills
- to better appreciate the importance of national and transnational contexts for cultural objects
- to engage students in textual interpretation, including the production of historically engaged and nuanced close reading of cultural objects
- to engage students in discussion of the lasting human interest of the texts assigned, as well as debates about their legacy in light of current pressing political issues