Beachy Head, South Downs, Sussex
Global Awareness: Romantic Britain
Romanticism’s Literary Sites and Landscapes—In Quest of Truth and Beauty
Spring 2015, January 22 – May 05
TTh 11:30-12:45 PM, Agnes Scott College, Buttrick G-23
Global Awareness Study Tour: May 17 – June 05
Romanticism’s Literary Sites and Landscapes—In Quest of Truth and Beauty
Roughly spanning the years 1780-1850, the Romantic era was one of the richest and most tumultuous periods of British literary history. Its proponents and practitioners were perhaps the most self-conscious assemblage of literary rebels and revolutionaries the world may have seen until that time. With Burns and Blake, Scott, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, most students of literature are already familiar by the time they enter college. But very few, if any, of them know of an equally stellar list of female poets, some of whom indeed inspired this constellation of male poets in the formative stages of their life. These male poets have so long been lauded and canonized in the academe that there are still large swathes of literary audiences that believe there were no other worthy of study and enjoyment in the period. But, of course, there are. Charlotte Turner Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Tighe, Mary Shelley, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, not to forget Anna Seward, Hannah More, Joanna Bailie, Ann Radcliffe, Ann Yearsley, and Anne Batten Cristall, were all widely popular in their times, some not only as poets but also as novelists, essayists, or diarists as well, and received a good bit of critical attention and acclaim in their times. Jane Austen, who wrote no poetry but has a towering reputation as a novelist, too is recognized as a Romanticist, and Emily Brontë, better known for her novel Wuthering Heights, writing her strange, powerful, lyrical poems from Haworth and the Yorkshire moors is another such intriguing figure. Her sisters Charlotte and Ann should be included in as well. These were all pioneering women, each in her different way, and this course will foreground why and how.
The Romantics had a special interest in Nature, which included for them both human nature (as in human psychology) as well as natural landscape and the nature of things. Indeed a number of them had an almost mystical relationship with natural surroundings and landscape from which they derived inspiration as well as solace and wisdom.
We will be visiting the locations and sites in which a number of writers from this wonderful assemblage of romantic poets moved and lived, places that inspired their poetry, landscapes that today we remember and cherish more because they wrote so feelingly about them, or because they inspired some of the best known poems in the English language, than for only the physical features themselves no matter how lovely or awe inspiring. As Keats writes at the end of one of his most well-known poems:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty;’ that is all
We know on earth, and all we need to know.
Our global awareness will take us on this quest of “truth and beauty,” and to their confluence, perhaps—but that is what we hope to find out during this period of our exploration. Interestingly, our search and study will not be confined only to “things English,” for Romanticism itself represents a convergence and intersection of many cultural and literary influences from Oriental poetry in translation—from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, to German romantic sensibility and theory as defined and developed by Goëthe and the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Karl Friedrich, from Scottish folkloric roots mined by James Macpherson of the Ossian poems, Burns, and Sir Walter Scott, to medieval influences and stimuli in Thomas Chatterton’s precocious poetry, from the French Revolution of 1789 and the writers that inspired it, notably Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot, to the women poets from 18th century England who had quietly created a revolution in taste and style even before the sensibility that this represented was given a definite label and name. And this being a period also of imperial expansion, concerns about colonization and slavery, utopian schemes and societies, preservation of cultures and the environments that produced them, freedom and responsibility, the attraction of the unfamiliar and the exotic, the nature of belief, religion, and superstition, free will and determinism, the concept of the “noble savage,” the place of poetry and imagination in the re-visioning of the world, all become important themes for the period. Through these themes, a large part of the globe is reflected in the writings of the romantic poets and writers enriching not only their minds but their very perception of the places in which they lived, and moved, and worked.
We shall look at selected writings by several poets, novelists, and essayists of the period in order to prepare ourselves for a three-week Global Awareness trip to various parts of Britain that are memorialized by these writers and cherished and remembered today because of them. We shall have the opportunity of looking at original manuscripts and memorabilia from the period even as we immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the places we visit, reflecting on and reviving for ourselves the charge and the energy they may have generated for the writers from the romantic period who lived there.
For the duration of this Global Awareness course and the study tour following it, students will maintain a notebook of daily activities and reflections on the subject and themes of this course and submit this to their professor for review at the conclusion of the trip.
For the trip itself, they are expected to maintain a regular blog on which they may post selections from their notebook, photographs of their journey through Britain, their own creative or scholarly pieces inspired by the experience, and any other material about British Romanticism they consider may be of interest to a wider audience.
Each student is expected to pick a subject (a writer and text, or texts) for research and make a presentation on it at the site most closely related to it during the trip to Britain. Expressions of interest regarding specific writers or texts you would like to present on should be submitted in writing by Feb. 5. Topics must be finalized, in consultation with your professor, by the start of the Spring break (March 12).
Seniors who are graduating at the end of this semester may fulfill this requirement by writing a paper on their presentation topic and submitting it for their final grade on May 30, 2015.
Global Awareness: Romantic Britain 