DESCRIPTION: The course will offer a broad overview of the political, intellectual and literary history of the Romantic period (1789-1850), focusing on the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Romantic Women Poets (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith and Felicia Dorothea Hemans). We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments during this period in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism), aesthetics (the prevailing interest in the sublime and the emergence of the aesthetics of the picturesque), art (the change from the tradition of portrait paintings or paintings on historical subjects to landscape paintings in which the main subject is represented by nature as the human figure diminishes in size and significance), and gardening (the change from the formal garden to a landscape that more nearly resembles the uncultivated look of the wilderness, according to standards set forth by picturesque aesthetics). After three weeks on these introductory topics, we will turn to an in-depth study of individual writers, focusing on their different representations of transcendence, the relationship with nature, transgression, the Promethean hero, female companionship, domesticity and the maternal bond.

BOOKS:
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford University Press,
1970).
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Bedford Books of St. Martin Press, 1992).

XEROX: Course packages are available from the Ave Copy Center (4141 University Way NE., Suite 103). Tel.: (206) 633-1837).