Romanticism was an artistic movement originating in the late eighteenth century that challenged the ideals of restraint and order that had characterized classicism and neoclassicism, and that rebelled against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Instead, Romantic artists emphasized imaginative spontaneity, subjectivity, radical individualism, and a close relationship to nature. In this seminar we will examine these and other themes in a representative selection of works by the most prominent English Romantic poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The textbook for this seminar is Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology, 4th ed. (2012), available at Librophoros (Rue de Rome 1, 1700 Fribourg), price: 40.50 CHF.
Credit requirements are regular attendance, active participation, class presentations, and an end-of-term paper of 4,000 words.
By the end of the seminar, students will have gained an understanding of the various political and cultural contexts in which these poems were composed, as well as an insight into the growth and characteristics of Romantic poetry. Students will also be introduced to a variety of techniques as well as a specific terminology for analyzing poetry, notably through close reading. Students will also have learned how to evaluate poems critically, how to present their work in research papers, and how to use both textual evidence and secondary sources in developing scholarly arguments.