ENGL 355 British Romanticism (C,G)
Although "Romantic" elements can be found both in works dating back to the Middle Ages (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval "romance") and in many works of contemporary culture (the paintings of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Julian Freud, the songs of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and the writings of Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Karen Russell also bear, each in its own way, the stigmata of "Romanticism"), this course focuses on British Romanticism, a discrete, intensely radical literary movement the central tenets of which are articulated in the revolutionary 1801 essay, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" in which the poet William Wordsworth effectively repudiates what he took to be the artificial values and habits of Neoclassical literature, recommending instead an aesthetic of sensation and imagination that both embodies and is intended to provoke a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Conventionally, the Romantic Movement has been understood to consist of two generations of authors, the first of which includes William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second Charles Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, and John Keats (of the 1819 "odes" fame). As a genre that leads its readers through more infernal "caverns measureless to man," "Gothic" literature is an expression of the Romantic impulse, with authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley also figuring in any serious study of this literary movement, which in the decades spanning the publication of Blake's Songs of Innocence in 1789 and the death of Byron in 1824 burned with a hard, gemlike flame that would eventually flare up again in the Décadent and Aesthetic Movements that flourished in fin de siècle Western Europe.