This course traces the evolution of British Romanticism’s ecological imagination from 1789-1832, a period that witnessed the transformation of rural Britain and the rapid growth of its cities. For twentieth-century critic Raymond Williams, the opposition between country and city was a rubric for understanding modernity. Following in his footsteps, we’ll explore how, as cities swelled, the countryside’s organic rhythms became nostalgic foils for the increasing spatial and temporal homogenization of everyday life.
Through our study of works by Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Leigh Hunt, among others, and artifacts of visual culture (from sketches and paintings by John Constable and J.M.W. Turner to popular visual entertainments like the panorama) we’ll discover how a changing rural landscape, urban development, and suburban expansion shaped early nineteenth-century media and literary production, as well as Romantic conceptions of nature and the self; social life and the environment.
Tuesday/Thursday, in person
Hannah LeClair
ENG 4870: Literature of the British Romantic Period
ENG 4870: Literature of the British Romantic Period