Department of English

This course will integrate the six main canonical poets of British Romanticism--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--with the major female poets who were household names of the age: Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Jane Taylor, and Felicia Hemans. The result will be a course that, on the one hand, attempts to locate significant ideas and tensions of this point of transition into a distinctly modern consciousness and, on the other hand, partly as a result of this shift reflects the first full-scale debate on literary and social values focused by issues of gender. The class is conducted through discussion with background lectures where appropriate. One short and two longer essays; final examination.