Legette, Casie
TR 11:10 AM
Park Hall 145
In this course, we will read literature from the British Romantic Period (1785-1832). This period in British history was a time of immense upheaval. The poems, novels, essays, and plays which we will read in this class engage directly with the overwhelming changes Britain was undergoing, thanks to the American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, a twenty-year long war with France, and the slow struggle to abolish slavery. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain’s economy was powerfully dependent on the income generated by the labor of enslaved people in the colonies of the British Caribbean. This course will pay particular attention to Britain’s relation to the Caribbean, during this period and beyond; we will investigate the presence of Britain’s imperial project in Romantic literature, and the role that literature played in the empire. We will read texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Oladuah Equiano, Samuel T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Letitia E. Landon, Mary Prince, George Gordon, Lord Byron, John Keats, and more. This course will introduce students to a range of genres, furthering their close reading skills in poetry, essays, and the novel.