Romantic Writing

This lecture course will offer you an introduction to the literature of the Romantic period (c.1770-1832). We will examine a range of writings – poetry in various forms, the novel, letters and political discourse – in order to get to grips with a key period in the development of modern literature and society. We will understand much of the literature of the age as a response to the dramatic events of the French Revolution from 1789 onward, which inspired both awe and revulsion in Britain. Topics examined will include: ideas of the sublime and the beautiful; self-consciousness in writing; memory and nostalgia; relationships to landscape and responses to war; gender and mobility; relationships to time and history; ideas of sympathy and the imagination. Throughout, our focus will be on ideas of sensibility and history. Texts that we study will include Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and the Odes and letters of John Keats.