Romantic-Era Extremities: Madness, Revolution, Sublimity, and the Celtic Fringe
ENGL 226
Fall 2017 not offered
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This course examines the Romantic fascination with psychological, political, aesthetic, and geographical extremes. We will explore how Romantic writers, who were by turns attracted and repelled by these extremities, found literary means of investigating and representing them. In the process, they refashioned forms such as the Gothic tale and verse narrative, and they reconsidered artistic categories such as sublimity, disorder, and fragmentation. Some questions we will ask include, How did the idea of extremity shape Romantic ideas about literary form? How did various sorts of extremity become aligned with one another? How did writers present the relationship between the center and the periphery, between norm and deviation? Were extreme experiences or states of being, whether individual or collective, aberrant parts of life, or were they intrinsic to what it meant to be human, or to be a society? Did extremity offer wisdom as well as danger, and, if so, how were the two related to one another? Might one grow from extremity toward a maturity that was at once stable and wiser for having ventured into those dangerous places? |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Literature) |
Major Readings:
Writings by Lord Byron, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, and others; Austen, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY; Blake, THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL; Blake, SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE; Byron, MANFRED; selections from Wordsworth, THE PRELUDE and LYRICAL BALLADS.
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Examinations and Assignments:
weekly response papers, final paper, class participation. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course satisfies the English Department's Literary History II requirement for the major, and the Research Option requirement for senior thesis writers, and it contributes to the British Lit concentration requirement. |
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