BSOC 3481

British Romanticism

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

With the exhilarating and terrifying historical "experiments" of the French and American Revolutions in the background, English Romantic writers tackled the question of the personal and political effects of literary experimentation. They did so in dialogue with new methods of experimental science that were unsettling traditional conceptions of thinking, feeling, nature and social progress. Could new literary techniques have revolutionary or reactionary effects, or elude the very logic of cause and effect? Might poems and novels alter routines of perception or harbor lost histories and futures? Such possibilities for "experiment" will guide this survey of Romantic literature, from poetic neuroscience to the Revolution controversy and experimental writing from Blake, the Shelleys, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Goethe, Baillie and Barbauld.

When Offered Spring.

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