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.
