ENGL 44320 - Global Romanticisms: Lakers, Cockneys, and Cosmopolitans

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

This course takes an interdisciplinary literary, visual, and spacial approach to the volatile interplay of regional, urban, and cosmopolitan culture in the formation of British Romanticism (approximately 1770-1830). Although British Romanticism has been traditionally characterized as an aesthetic movement celebrating nature and regional "English" values, particularly grounded in the northern Lake District, recent scholarship increasingly emphasizes the explosive artistic and political friction between this local priority and Romanticism's engagement with Britain's deepening immersion in multiple urban and global contexts, such as: the Transatlantic slave trade and abolition movement; the French Revolution and the global scope of the Napoleonic wars; the spread of empire; and the hotbed of radical culture based in London, which strategically identified with working class "Cockney" life while also affirming a revolutionary Cosmopolitanism seeking political reform on the global level. The class will build on these new scholarly developments by exploring the ways in which British Romantic literature and painting emerged out of intense political and aesthetic conflicts associated with the affirmations of "English" rural life in Constable and the Lake School of writers (or "Lakers") headed by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; the abolition movement, featuring the political writings of Wilberforce and the slave narratives of Mary Prince and Olaudah Equiano; the problematics of colonialism in Ireland and India examined in the works of Scott, Turner, and Lady Morgan; the emergence of "global feminism" in the writings of Hamilton, Smith, and Mary Shelley; and the rise of radical "Cockneyism" in the urban poetics of Hunt, Keats, Byron, and Percy Shelley and its transportation into a politically subversive Cosmopolitanism dedicated to the sensuous pleasures of Italy and sensitive to persisting conflicts (of high relevance to our world today) between Muslim and European culture in the Mediterranean.

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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