The Romantic Period

[ Faculty in this Area ] Noah Heringman

Program Description

The MA and PhD specializations in British Romanticism offer students the opportunity to focus intensively on one of the most turbulent and productive periods in British cultural history.

The half-century around the French Revolution (1780-1830) saw an astonishing rise in political radicalism followed by a sweeping wave of political and cultural reaction.  Both movements were fueled by a massive expansion of print culture and an increasing variety of exhibitions, entertainments, and other cultural commodities aimed at an expanding public.  Both nationally and locally, Romanticists benefit from their proximity to scholars in the eighteenth century and the Victorian period, whose wide-ranging and often allied studies of the earlier and later decades help to maintain a scholarly niche for the intensive study of the revolutionary decades.  In a changing job market, Romanticism remains one of the stable categories showing a consistent demand for new assistant professors. 

The Romantic period boasts not only six legendary poets in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, but also an equally stellar pantheon of gifted and commercially successful women writers including Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Felicia Hemans, and a broad, historically unprecedented range of writing that is still being discovered by students and scholars.  The beginnings of two very different strands of modernity — recognizable forms of popular culture, on the one hand, and rising ecological awareness, on the other — are currently attracting the attention of a new generation of scholars to the Romantic period.  Another major cultural event of 1789 — the biggest news in London that year before the fall of the Bastille — was the opening of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, a massive commercial venture to expand the franchise on literary taste.  Boydell’s spectacular undertaking effectively symbolizes the crucial importance of the Romantic period for shaping our modern conception of literature, which acquired its specialized modern sense of “poetry, fiction, and drama” between 1780 and 1830

Faculty Overview

Noah Heringman has worked closely with graduate students and with his colleagues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, as well as other colleagues with substantial expertise in Romanticism, to build a strong and supportive community for the study of modern British literature and culture. William Dawson, the department's Senior Academic Adviser, also received his PhD in the field, and Lynne McMahon, a professor in the Creative Writing Program, has long pursued Romantic poetry as a field of scholarly specialization. 

We are in the process of collaborating with our colleagues George Justice (eighteenth century), Devoney Looser (eighteenth century), Elizabeth Chang (Victorian period), and Nancy West (Victorian period) on a shared platform for the contextually-oriented study of modern British literature (1660-1900).  Much of the teaching and research of this larger group of faculty shares in common a methodological orientation toward print culture and visual studies.

Opportunities

Our program offers students of Romanticism a strong community of faculty and graduate students in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature.  We meet informally several times each semester, providing a forum for discussion of shared critical reading as well as student work.  Our faculty are particularly active in the department’s interdisciplinary initiatives, including the literature and science and visual studies concentrations.  We also embrace the department’s commitment to professional development.  Three students from one recent seminar in Romanticism formed a panel featured on the program of the International Conference on Romanticism, and all graduate student conference travel is eligible for department funding.  Graduate students in Romanticism also have the opportunity to team-teach in their specialty with a faculty member, a model that allows much greater independence than the "teaching assistant" model while also giving students exposure to the advanced undergraduate classroom.

Facilities

Ellis Library Special Collections has fine holdings in eighteenth-century British printed materials. For example, students interested in the picturesque will find an unusually complete collection of the works of William Gilpin, in the original editions. See also the MU Library's strong list of early British periodical holdings.

Course Offerings

Recent upper-level course topics: [ descriptions ]
• Romanticism and Natural History • Blake and the Radical Writers of the 1790's • The Sublime: Theory and Practice, 1700-2000 • Romanticism and Visual Culture	• British Romanticism • Other Romantics • William Blake in His Time