ENGL 350-01, Romantic Poetry and Prose, Fall 2011

Abstract

A relatively brief period that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and continued to develop throughout the early Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the Romantic era produced some of the perhaps best-known and most lionized figures of the British literary canon: Blake, Burke, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth all published the greatest part of their works between the 1780s and 1830s. This course will approach the major poetry and prose of these and other important authors of the period through several critical and methodological frameworks that will place the literature of British Romanticism in the contexts of massive social and political change, startling advances in knowledge production and scientific inquiry, and challenging contemporary conceptualizations of the past, present, and future of British Literature itself.