WRLIT208 L: Radical Romantics

In this seminar we'll read and discuss the work of writers who have been associated with the English Romantic movement (roughly 1790-1830), but we'll insert an important difference into our reading. Rather than following the traditional interpretation of Romanticism as a priviledged expression of heightened individuality, we'll follow the traces of the radical Republican movement that sustained or influenced the thinking, the politics and the styles of Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Coleridge, Clare, Hazlitt, Cobbett, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and others. This radical popular movement, at times punishable as treason, was firmly tied to the anti-royalist politics of the English, American, and French Revolutions, and to newer pacifist, feminist and anti-slavery movements. In this light we'll contextualize these Romantic writers as the acutely engaged political experimentalists they were, seeking out new integrations of daily life, aesthetics, and political action, in writing lives that embraced communalism, collaboration, principled dissidence, internationalism and libratory philosophies. Required Text Romanticism: An Anthology, ed Duncan Wu (Blackwell Publishers)