The Romantic period witnessed the birth of major new forms of writing and thinking that are still relevant today. The social transition from an age of commerce and colonialism to an era of industry and imperialism radically changed the entire surface of the world. Sciences that we take for granted were born: ecology, biology, psychology. Adam Smith wrote his work on capitalism and the politics of working class was born, though it was not yet called socialism. This was the age of William Blake and Mary Shelley, of Jane Austen and William Wordsworth, of Coleridge and Keats and Mary Wollstonecraft. This class will give you a sense of what the period looked like and felt like (and sounded like); and a feel for the ideas it established about poetry, society and nature, which are still with us. In particular, we'll be concentrating on how Romantic literature generated many of the ecological ideas that are with us today.
Latest episodes of the podcast Romanticism, Spring 2009
- Why Romanticism?
- William Blake: The Politics of Innocence 1
- William Blake: Are You Experienced? 1
- William Blake: The Politics of Innocence 2
- William Blake: Are You Experienced? 2
- William Blake: What is Coexistence?
- Jane Austen: Narrative and Interiority 1
- Jane Austen: Narrative and Interiority 2
- A Materialist Theory of Reading
- Jane Austen: Narrative and Interiority 3
- William Wordsworth: Radical Poetics
- William Wordsworth: Green Poetics
- William Wordsworth: Dark Ecology
- William Wordsworth: Eco-Elegy
- Ecological Coleridge: "It Happens"
- Ecological Coleridge: Poetry as Algorithm
- John Clare: It's Not Easy Being Green
- Ecological Coleridge: Queer Materiality
- De Quincey: Romantic Consumerism 1
- De Quincey: Romantic Consumerism 2
- John Keats: Romantic Consumerism 3
- Beautiful Soul Syndrome
- Percy Shelley: Reimagining Nature
- The Poetics of Protein
- Frankenstein: Monsters R Us 1
- Frankenstein: Monsters R Us 2