Course summary

By setting Romantic and Sentimental writings alongside each other, this MA offers students an opportunity to find their own paths through the literary and cultural history of the period. The Romantic movement has traditionally been seen to dominate the aesthetic and literary output of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but recent critical and historical scholarship has emphasized the range and diversity of contemporary literary forms and styles of writing which cannot comfortably be treated as though they were part of that movement. By examining the selected literary and aesthetic works in the light of the historical circumstances in which they were produced, the MA offers participants the chance to develop a broad view of the major changes in sensibility and ideology of the period, and to investigate such contemporary issues as: the representation of landscape or revolution; the place of women as writers; the role of the periodicals as a cultural medium and the importance of ideas of Empire and the Orient; Romantic aesthetic theory and poetic practice.