Department of English

Between the 1760s and the 1860s an Atlantic-rim literary phenomenon termed Romanticism occurred. This was not simply a British movement led by a handful of men (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth), but a vast conversation between men and women, Europeans and Americans, and blacks and whites. In this class, we will immerse ourselves in the major conversations and debates taking place during this time concerning revolution and reform, the line between civilization and nature, gender formation, and slavery and abolition. Among the poets, novelists, and essayists we will read are the five mentioned above, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheately, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Apess, Samsom Occom, Mary Prince, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Emily Dickinson, andLydia Sigourney.