Romantic Literature from Blake to Shelley

Module code: EN2147

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live, read and write during a period of war, revolution, and dynamic social change? If so, this is the module for you. The literature of the Romantic period spans the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the unsettled aftermath of the world-wide war against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. 

Meaning ‘wild’ and ‘irregular’, as well as ‘fanciful’ and ‘idealistic’, Romanticism engages with a range of progressive social causes, including the anti-slavery movement, universal suffrage, environmentalism, and feminism. Its formal range is no less diverse, encompassing the bold, visual and verbal experimentation of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), the radical challenge of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the work of the later, ‘second generation’ poets, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, as well as innovative prose writings: from Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist fictions, Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798) to Austen’s sophisticated querying of the relations between gender, love and marriage in Pride and Prejudice (1813). We will also consider writers who fought for equal rights and against oppression: from early feminist and abolitionist writings to texts written in support of Leicester's pioneering sugar boycott.