Romantic Literature

Romantic literature sits at the hinge where Enlightenment reason gives way to imagination, revolution, and the self as a serious subject of inquiry, and this course works through that shift by reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Keats, Byron, Austen, and Wollstonecraft against the backdrop of the French Revolution, the sublime, early Gothic, and emerging feminist thought. Expect weekly response papers, a paper proposal that grows into a term paper, two midterms, and seminar-style discussion where you're expected to do close reading rather than absorb lectures. It fills out the period survey between your 18th-century and Victorian courses and gives you the critical vocabulary you'll lean on in later genre and theory electives.