English 246G

Other Readings and Media

Jane Austen: Persuasion; S.T. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria; Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Friedrich Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; Mary Shelley: Frankenstein; Charlotte Smith: The Poems of Charlotte Smith ; Dorothy Wordsworth: The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth; David Perkins, ed.: English Romantic Writers

Description

This class is not a 203 or a 250 in disguise. We will read widely in and around Romanticism, taking up as many pertinent topics as we can, perhaps including: aesthetics, politics, and ideology; the performance of lyric subjectivity; the gendering of genre; historical trauma and political melancholy, especially in relation to the French Revolution; affect and agency; negotiations of a newly dominant print culture; poetry and social competence; the sublime and the avant-garde. We will also spend time tracing a genealogy of recent critical engagements, showing how deconstruction, historicism, and (for want of a better term) the new formalism have passed through the period, trying to make Romanticism their own.