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WiSe 13/14: S-Lit. Stud.: Periods-Genres-Concepts: Romanticism and Revolution: The Shelley Circle

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

The second generation Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century were not overtly concerned with the French and American Revolutions like their first generation predecessors. Yet these younger writers lived during a period when the British working classes increasingly agitated against social and political inequalities, and when the government and monarch reacted with repressive measures such as the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, widely regarded as the keystone of English liberty. Percy Bysshe Shelley has traditionally been seen as a poet and essayist intrinsically concerned with the politics of his age. His verse response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1818 was later adopted as a prime example of passive resistance by great twentieth century political leaders such as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and his works were being translated by Friedrich Engels during the period he was collaborating with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto. Whilst George Gordon Byron was known for his aristocratic excesses, the novels of Mary Shelley have largely been seen as autobiographical, and the poetry of John Keats viewed until very recently as escapist and idealistic, they all nevertheless can be seen as engaging in various ways with an English nation on the brink of revolution. This course will examine the fraught relationship between aesthetics and politics in the work of P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron and Keats. Beginning with Tom Paine's Refelections on the Revolution in France, students will go on to examine ideas of representation, the imagination, constructions of the past and the future, and the potential for action in the poetry and novels of Shelley and his contemporaries. Students must have read Burke's Reflections and Paine's Rights of Man by the beginning of semester.

Assessment: one 4000-word essay due after the end of semester

Set Texts:

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford World's Classics, 1999.

Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior the the beginning of semester.

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