LITERATURE
Course Level: Undergraduate
Topics vary by section, may be repeated for credit with different topic. In the wake of complete social and political upheaval, eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic writers questioned longstanding assumptions. Rotating topics include the Romantic imagination, the politics of poetry, and the Shelley circle. Usually offered every year.
Course Level: Undergraduate
Topics in Romantic Literature (3)
Technologies of the Romantic Self
British Romantic writing produced dynamic and intensified examples of the individual in literature. This course examines and investigates the Romantic "I" as well as various other strategies for the production of first-personhood in texts of the British Romantic period. The class considers William Wordsworth's epic of the self, The Prelude, as a key text to open our exploration of literary issues such as authenticity, identity, voice, and constructions of individual agency. Rather than merely celebrating an emergent Romantic "self," the course problematizes the fictions of selfhood upon which Romantic literature relies. Other texts include Percy Shelley's Queen Mab and Ode to the West Wind, and Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.