ENG 4870: Literature of the British Romantic Period will be taught by Dr. William Brewer this Fall 2021 semester. It will meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:00 - 10:50 AM in room 210 of the newly rennovated Sanford Hall. This class "will focus on the Romantic-era quest for racial, gender, social, and political justice. We will study and discuss slave narratives, Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, contemporaneous responses to the French Revolution, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, proto-feminist texts, and Romantic poetry."
From Dr. Brewer,
During the British Romantic Period, passionate debates erupted over slavery, women’s rights, and the rights of all humans. In a 1772 legal decision, Lord Mansfield ruled that “as soon as ever any slave set his foot upon the soil of England, he became free,” and antislavery advocates declared that the sugar from slave plantations in the West Indies was “blood sugar.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women must receive rational educations, and her posthumously-published novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) explored the tragic consequences of female oppression. Beginning in 1789, the debate over the French Revolution inspired radical works such as Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791), prompting a conservative backlash. In 1819, between ten and twenty English citizens demanding parliamentary reform were slain in the Manchester “Peterloo” massacre, and Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his poem “The Mask of Anarchy” in protest. ENG 4870, Literature of the British Romantic Period will focus on the Romantic-era quest for racial, gender, social, and political justice. We will study and discuss slave narratives, Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, contemporaneous responses to the French Revolution, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, proto-feminist texts, and Romantic poetry.
ENG 4870: Literature of the British Romantic Period
ENG 4870: Literature of the British Romantic Period