Undergraduate Courses
E 426 British Romanticism
Students will read and engage with a broad
range of works that belong to the period defined as British
Romanticism
(1780s-1830s). Our guiding focus will be the intersection
of Romantic aesthetics and literary imagination with a dynamic
and dramatic socio-political context: an age responding to
the American and French Revolutions and then the conservatism
of Georgian Britain, the beginnings of the industrial revolution,
the rise of an urban working class, a consumer-oriented marketplace,
the emergence of a national consciousness at home in the
wake of the consolidation of British power abroad, and the
rigidification of sex and gender roles. The material will
be organized around a number of topics (which could fluctuate
from semester to semester) that will allow students to see
those issue mediated through the possibilities and constraints
of genre, gender, real and imagined audiences, and sociopolitical
context. Thus, as we move away from defining Romanticism
through a survey of the traditional major five authors, we
will also consider the advantages and disadvantages of periodization
and the critical debates about what “Romanticism” is.
The themes during any one semester could include but are
not limited to: the French Revolution, the Romantic sublime,
the gothic, the rights of man, the rights of woman, Romantic
autobiography, homelessness and vagrancy, slavery and abolition
in Britain, social and political economies, the creation
of childhood, the discovery of nature, the rise of the supernatural,
literary criticism, and romantic passions and irrationalism.
Contact us: Through the mail at 1773 Campus Delivery, 359 Eddy Hall, Ft. Collins, CO 80523-1773. On the phone at (970) 491-6428. By email at english@lamar.colostate.edu.
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