Description
This course will explore British poetry of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, from roughly 1789 until 1832. Primary texts may include work by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Austen, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, keats, and De Quincey. The course will consider such major issues and concerns as: the powers of the imagination; theories of poetry and the poet; the French Revolution; social and political reform; national idenity; war and empire; the slave trade; constructions of gender; and responses to the natural world. In the process, it will introduce students to the social, political , and intellectual contexts of the Romantic period.