ENGL6309 · English

Seminar: British Romanticism and its Discontents, 1780-1850

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

British writing in the period (roughly 1798-1835), has often been lumped together as entirely steeped in the ideology of Romanticism: the truth of the feelings, the power of nature, the exalted role of the poet, and above all individual vision. We have received this ideology--largely put forth and grouped together much later--from William Blake, William Wordsworth, P.S. Shelly, Lord Byron, and John Keats. But there were other contending voices in the era, too, both big and small, as well as famous, not famous, and infamous. Above all, writing in the Romantic era could actually be funny. This course attempts to look at the Romantic Period through all of its manifestations: novelistic, comic, serious, and periodical, as well as early Victorian reactions to it. We will read authors, both poets and prose writers, from the late eighteenth century through the early Victorian period including Thomas Gray, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, P. S. Shelley, Lord Byron, Anne Lister, Felicia Hemans, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, John Hamilton Reynolds, Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Mary Mitford, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.Fulfills Seminar, and pre-1900.