ENGL 350-01, Imagining the Nation: Romantic-era Poetry and Prose, Fall 2009

Abstract

Literary critics have often bestowed a disproportionate degree of attention on the period known as 'Romantic'. Only fifty or so years in duratiory that era produced some of the most recognizable names in canonical literary and intellectual history. Yet while the number of novelists, poets, dramatists and writers of other stripes may distinguish the period as a moment of extraordinary creativity, it was also a moment of great political and social significance in the identity of what we call'Britain'. From January'J.801,w, ith the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were now tied together in a single polity, despite their distinct differences. This act once again intensified interest in the problem of the new collective'British' identity, and the lost individual sovereignty of its composite parts. While many celebrated the new powerful political unity of Britain as a response to external threats - the American and French revolutions that had rocked British confidence and ongoing conflicts with France - writers of all kinds imagined the nation in terms that grieved, rejoiced, questioned and derided: an enormously rich outpouring of literature that revived interest in local attachments, national cultures, places and the past.