English 130 - Winter, 2023

British Romantic Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Badley, Chip
CRN: 23439
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Location: 115 Hutch
GE Areas: World Cultures Writing Experience

Description

This course will introduce students to British Romantic literature published between 1789 and 1837, a period characterized by upheavals in literature, politics, empire, science, and industry. We will study texts that both reflected and shaped this formative era, including major poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Shelley), novelists (Jane Austen and Mary Shelley), and autobiographical writers (Olaudah Equiano). Topics to include, but are not limited to: the Enlightenment; the cult of sensibility; the rise of the novel; the Industrial Revolution; urbanization; the Age of Revolutions; capitalism; antislavery and abolition movements; feminism; empire; nature and ecology; childhood and adulthood; beauty and the sublime; and the Gothic. If ?poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? (as Percy Shelley claims in his 1821 essay ?A Defence of Poetry?), we will explore how British Romanticism affected contemporary understandings of literature and its role in the world.

Grading

Two essays
Midterm Exam
Annotated Bibliography
Final Exam

Texts

1. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: The Romantic Period
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Olaudah Equiano
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley