English Romantic Poets: Critical Assessment

The British romantic writers lived through a period of rapid change and the violent political upheavals of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and responded fully to these changes in their writing. We will focus on a selection of the poetry and prose written during this period, from the Fall of the Bastille (1789) to the Reform Act (1832). The writers to be studied will include poets such as Blake, Robinson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Tighe, and Keats, the political writers of Burke, Williams, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Selections from the work of the main essayists, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey; and several novels that represent the Gothic tradition or the reaction against it. In addition to considering the literary texts, we will also look at some of the theoretical writings of the period, such as Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Balldas and Shelley’s defence of poetry.