Studies in The Romantic Movmnt
Students will engage in intensive consideration of selected Romantic period texts. The focus of the course will vary according to the instructor's choice of topic.
Outcomes: Students will be able to discuss and analyze the texts studied in this course, and to articulate diverse positions on the issues related to the course's central topic.
Students will engage in intensive consideration of selected Romantic period texts. The focus of the course will vary according to the instructor's choice of topic.
Outcomes: Students will be able to discuss and analyze the texts studied in this course, and to articulate diverse positions on the issues related to the course's central topic.
Pre-requisites: UCWR 110 and one 200-level English course.
¿Graves and the glorious Phantom.¿
This course will be an intensive study of what¿s sometimes called ¿second-generation Romanticism¿: the women and men writing in England from roughly 1810 to 1830, including John Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. Many of them were born too late to know the initial enthusiasms of the French Revolution¿this generation comes of age amidst decades of global war, social collapse, and seemingly inevitable tyranny at home and abroad. Yet it was just these despondencies that Percy Shelley figured as ¿graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.¿ Our subject will be both graves and phantoms. We¿ll study the collapse of political possibility on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars and in the massacre of peaceful demonstrators at ¿Peterloo¿¿and we¿ll also study the spiritual transfigurations of this collapse in some of the most electrifying literature ever produced in the English-speaking world. We¿ll roam from Austen¿s parlors to Byron¿s Alps, from Scott¿s Scotland to Keats¿s Rome, meeting along the way the expected opium addicts, freedom fighters, pirates, and women pregnant with the Second Coming of Christ. You¿ll also write papers, take exams, and be subjected to other disagreeable things. Fulfills the 1700-1900 and/or pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
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