 Overview
Schedule
Assignments
Student Writing
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 English 610 is an advanced seminar focused on major works of the British Romantic period (1770-1830), including the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. This course will contemplate various narratives of origin that have traditionally defined the English Romantic period, including Romantic poetic form, the revolutionary controversy, and the major thematic preoccupations that can also be said to be definitive of the period, including the value of revolution; the definitions of liberty, freedom, and equality; fraternity, friendship, love, and passion; romantic imagination; romantic landscape and the sublime; and literature’s capacity to represent and/or effectuate socio-political and individual transformation. To augment our work on major Romantic writers, we will study predecessor poets John Donne, John Milton, John Denham, and Alexander Pope; Romantic-era philosophy; visual culture; and the writing of romanticist critics W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Paul de Man, and Alan Liu, all of which helps to shape the period we know as English Romanticism today. |
Office & Office Hours
 Flagg Road 124
TH 11-noon; 2:15-3:15pm
Location & Time
Flagg Road 105
T 3:30-6:15pm
Required Texts
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)
Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)
William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)
Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)
William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)
H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)
Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)
Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)
Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)
Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)
Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)
NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.
Course Requirements
Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%)
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