ENG20490

This module will introduce students to the Romantic period of literature, which falls approximately between the French Revolution (1789) and the ascent of Queen Victoria to the British throne (1837). The Romantic period was one of peculiar eventfulness. Great changes and possibilities opened with the fall of the Bourbons in France, only to give way to suspicion and paranoia with the advent of the French Terror and the Napoleonic wars. As the increasingly conservative philosopher and Irish MP Edmund Burke wrote in his 'Reflections on the Revolution in France', 'everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.' This was a period full of tumult and excitement, something that makes itself felt in many of the texts that we will read. Romantic writers are still among the best-known today, and include William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley. In addition to canonical poets, dramatists, novelists, and non-fiction writers, we will explore the writings of lesser-known writers such as Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Olaudah Equiano. We will also consider a variety of genres from the Gothic novel to the autobiography to the nature poem. Looking at themes such as 'Slavery and Abolition', 'Radicalism and Protest', 'Romantic War', and 'Romantic Dystopia', we will examine how both radical and conservative writers dealt with the great changes that emerged in the period.