ENGL 40341 - The Romantic Period 1780-1840

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!" (William Wordsworth). One of the most exciting things about the Romantic period in Britain is its engagement with ideas and themes that attract the young: human rights, democracy, travel, satire, love, melancholy and horror. We will sail with Coleridge's ancient mariner, walk the Lake District with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, peer into Percy Shelley's soul and luxuriate with Keats. We will discover what it means to see poetry as "indeed something divine" and poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." We will learn the language of sensibility and understand how Marianne Dashwood's "effusions of sorrow," in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, fit into a cult of writing on the expressive body. Why is John Clare so interested in birds' nests? Why are mountains "sublime" and ruins "picturesque"? Who is the "Man of Feeling"? Central themes will include Romantic historicism, revolutionary politics, the dissenting tradition, human rights, picturesque and sublime aesthetics, feminism, sensibility, experimentalism, gothic literature, and travel writing. Key authors will include Jane Austen, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Keats, Robert Southey, John Clare and William Hazlitt.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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