E Lit 313 - Topics in English & American Literature

Institution:

Washington University in St Louis

Subject:

Description:

Called the "Age of Revolution," the Romantic Age of British literature, 1770-1830, witnessed the birth of new lyric forms, the effacement of traditional strictures on style and taste, and produced through poetic voice (and its quaverings and multiplications) what might be called, oversimply, the modern subject. Within a developing discourse of human rights and personal freedom, this growing assertion through poetry of individual expressivity allowed William Blake to construct in a single work a visual and verbal Jerusalem. It encouraged William Wordsworth to write a pathbreaking investigation of the sources of his own creativity that challenged conventional restraints on what topics can, and cannot, be confessed in poetry. Beginning with these two poets, we consider the historical contexts, and the sometimes competing histories of ideas, that shaped the six major British Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and John Keats. We follow an anthology for much of the poetry, including the poems and prose of influential contemporaries (female as well as male) who included the political philosopher Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. Texts assigned also include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Byron's Don Juan.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.wustl.edu

Phone Number:

(314) 935-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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