British Romanticism (Heringman)

This course reconsiders traditional definitions of Romanticism as the poetry of nature and imaginative vision by reading the six canonical poets--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--with and against a range of women writers in prose and poetry, including Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ann Radcliffe. Although there are some obvious contrasts between male and female writers in this period, this approach also highlights the many concerns they shared: the discourse on human rights and other concerns arising from the French revolution; the slave trade and the growth of empire; natural history and the growth of scientific specialization; and the cultural example of ancient Greece, among others. We will also draw on the numerous travel narratives written by both men and women to consider period attitudes toward people and places in different parts of Britain and the empire, as well as the contours of "Romantic nature" and its relationship to today's discourse on "the environment."

Romanticism and Visual Culture (Heringman)

This course introduces graduate students to the study of Romanticism by way of the many fruitful relationships established between verbal and visual media in the period. A significant portion of the course is devoted to the works of William Blake, whose poems are composite works of art equally remarkable for their text, their images, and the book form in which he produced them. Blake's writings on art, Lessing's Laokoon, and Reynolds' Discourses will be some of our sources on the aesthetic theory of an age in which poetry and painting were often viewed as "sister arts." Blake's involvement with literary illustration will introduce us to another topic of the course, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, a remarkable and ambitious commercial venture for linking visual culture to the literary canon. We will also consider Wordsworth's poetic critique--in The Prelude and elsewhere--of the picturesque aesthetic and of spectacle in popular culture. In a unit on Ann Radcliffe, we will consider her more positive relationship with the picturesque in The Mysteries of Udolpho, as well as issues of taste and scenic design raised by stage adaptations of her novels. A unit on political cartoons will return us to the synergy of word and image, a major critical and theoretical focus of the course. We'll conclude with a substantial unit on the controversy over the Parthenon sculptures, a controversy ignited by their arrival in England in 1807. This debate provides a valuable framework for understanding major poems by Keats, Shelley, and Hemans, as well as the rising claims of professionalism in the arts.

The Sublime: Theory and Practice, 1700-2000 (Heringman)

The sublime has been an exceptionally durable and controversial category within modern literary culture.The broad aim of this course is to encourage research on any form of aesthetic experience or artistic practice influenced by the aesthetics of the sublime.The course considers theories of the sublime from their initial flowering between 1710 and 1810 and from their revival during the last twenty-five years. We are also sampling some of the literary works traditionally associated with the sublime, most substantially Thomson, Blake, Radcliffe, Wordsworth, and the Shelleys. The primary focus of the course is on cultural practices--including tourism, amateur naturalizing, and landscape design, as well as writing and reading--that shape the sublime as a category.The course draws on both eighteenth-century and contemporary theories of the sublime to help us understand the role of the sublime in specific areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, such as women's writing and nationalist discourse. I also hope to use the current theory to help us in thinking about the roles of the sublime in contemporary American culture.Two contemporary concerns highlighted briefly toward the end of the course are feminism and environmentalism.