REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM

The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, the period identified with the Enlightenment and Romanticism and the American and French Revolutions, is a formative era for the modern world.  This course focuses on literary and cultural production in the period 1790-1825.  It will investigate issues such as how literary texts represent and participate in historical change; explore the relationship between polemical texts such as Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine's Rights of Man and the poetry, drama and fiction; consider the impact of a new politics of gender in emergent genres such as the Gothic, the politics of print culture in the period and the relationship between 'elite' and 'popular' cultures.

By the end of the course you should be able to:

1. Apply knowledge of the historical contexts of this period to specific texts studies.
2. Identify key elements that are distinctive of literature of the Romantic period.
3. Reflect, discuss and writing about what the literature of the Romantic period tells us about the society of the time.
4. Develop your own critical thinking about impact of this period on the development of English literary history and how we view literature and the Romantic period today.

 Texts and authors to be covered will include: Burke and Paine (selections), Godwin, Caleb Williams, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, Lord George Byron, Selections from Don Juan, John Clare, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Pierce Egan's Life in London, John Keats, Poems and Letters, William Hazlitt, Selected Writings