English 375 —British Romanticism 1770-1830

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

English 375 will survey two moments of intensive literary production during the period of English romanticism. The first of these points is the period around 1800, which includes such writers as William Godwin, William Burke, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We will study an inception point of Romanticism, the revolution controversy, which was a political movement in letters focused on democratic reform in England spurred by the American and French revolutions. We will then put the revolution controversy into dialogue with early Romantic literary projects that attempt to theorize revolution as well as political change generally through the distinctly aesthetic forms of poetry and the novel. The second point of emphasis in this course is the period around 1819, often termed the “second-generation” of romantic literary production, which includes Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. We will read major works of these later romantic writers in order to analyze how each takes up, transforms, or ignores critical conversations begun a generation earlier on the value of revolution; the definitions of liberty, freedom, equality, fraternity, friendship, love, and passion; nature; imagination; and finally, literature's capacity to produce real change, whether that be on the socio-political or individual level. Although this course will survey many literary genres, it has been designed to give you an opportunity to study poetic form in particular depth, and to illustrate that studying poetry will enable you to think and read all literary texts more carefully, interestingly, and pleasurably both through your increasing capacity to analyze complex language and your increased understanding of literary history.