350:307
Early Romantic Literature

01    MW4    CAC     05262     BARRY     MU-208

This course will introduce students to the early Romantic era in Britain. We will begin with the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, an event whose pervasive influence was felt by British writers across the political spectrum. While the Romantics are most often treated as initially sympathetic to the revolution, we will try to catch hold of the complexity of political allegiance throughout the period by turning first to works by Edmund Burke, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, alongside cartoons and prints by Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, and Thomas Rowlandson. These texts will introduce some of the period’s recurring tensions: between a desire to preserve vanishing traditions and a desire to attain a more just and equitable political reality; between reason and the imagination; between nature and culture.  We’ll trace these tensions through the strange, evocative poetry and etchings of William Blake; Matthew Lewis’s Gothic masterpiece the Monk; and the “Lake Poets” William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We’ll conclude the course with short prose works by William Hazlitt and Thomas DeQuincey that recount the ‘apostasy’ of their Romantic mentors.