Course description

The scientific and political upheavals of the Enlightenment have conventionally marked the end of an era ripe with superstition, mysticism, and magic. However, the Romantic period in Britain saw a resurgence of interest in literature concerned with the unexplainable and strange. From poems like Rime of the Ancyent Marinere to novels like Frankenstein, British Romanticism (1780-1830) is littered with impossible settings, ghostly hauntings, and perverse relationships. This course will survey a broad swath of Romantic era literature with a special focus on the gothic and apocalyptic. We’ll examine novels, poetry and essays—as well as paintings and cartoons—that respond to the key political events and reform movements of the 1780s and 1790s, including the French Revolution, abolition, and women’s rights. In the second half of the course, we’ll assess the disillusionment that followed the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars by looking at the transformation of fantasy genres. We’ll study texts by canonical and lesser known authors—including William Godwin, Robert Burns, Ann Radcliffe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Mary Shelley—to understand how and why authors chose to write about the fantastic and fabulous in an Age of Revolution.