Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History
ENGL 334
Spring 2018 not offered
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What does history feel like? What does it mean to imagine that your present moment is part of a larger historical trajectory? Or, that you are making history in that moment? The period of Romanticism, roughly 1780-1830, is charged with ideas about revolution, progress, and the power of the imagination. Yet it is also a period deeply obsessed with its relationship to the past in a manner unlike any era before it, as writers and thinkers explored the feel of history in radical new ways. This course will survey the major Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--with special attention to the sense and meaning of history in their writing. We will read Romantic narratives of personal development, chants of eternal revolution, satires on modern life and government, and excavations and fantasies of a medieval past. We will consider how Romantic writers spun both art and argument on the axis of history and found themselves reflected there, and we will examine, in turn, our own relationship to the literature of the past as 21st-century readers. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
Major Readings:
The major poems of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; prose selections from Edmund Burke, Anna Barbauld, William Hazlitt, and others.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Attendance and active class participation; 2 shorter papers and research project. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the Literary History II requirement and contributes to the British Literature and Theory and Literary Forms concentrations of the English major. |
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