Department of English

Romanticism was a literary movement that directed and reflected numerous, and sometimes violent, emancipatory struggles across the final decade of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. Indeed the Romantic movement itself was shaped largely in reaction to the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror. In this course will closely examine British Romantic poetic and prose works preoccupied with challenging, among others ideas, notions of the human, social order, and literature. Among other works, we will read Charlotte Smith’s Desmond, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and poetry by William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Hannah More.