ENG20490 Romanticism

Academic Year 2022/2023

Please be aware that modules may move online if directed to do so by Government advice.

This course will introduce students to the Romantic period of literature, which falls approximately between the French Revolution (1789) and the ascent of 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 Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution, '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 much of the texts that we will read. Romantic writers are still among the best-known today, and include writers such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. In addition to the more famous poets and novelists, we will explore the writings of relatively new additions to the Romantic canon, including both male and female writers. We will also consider a variety of genres from the Gothic novel to the nature poem. Common concepts, ideas and themes cross textual boundaries in this period, and we will be examining how both radical and conservative writers dealt with the great changes that this period saw.

PLEASE NOTE that the School of English, Drama and Film reserves the right to withdraw modules in the period up to and including the first week of the teaching trimester.