This course will explore the literatures of Romanticism, which arose in the wake of the revolutions in America and France. The Romantic era was not only an upheaval age of revolutions in a political sense, but also in terms of on the individual and psychological level. Romanticism ushered in a fascination with transgression: religious, social, sexual, aesthetic, and mental. As a reaction to the Enlightenment, Romantic literature invented new forms to express various states of mind: vision, dream, melancholy, and horror - both in prose and poems. One avenue of exploration was the supernatural, which manifested itself in for example in the novel Frankenstein. The new licence to write poetry also included women, colonial subjects and former slaves: The enslaved African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley used her poetry to gain her emancipation. We will engage with this recently recovered dimension of a global romanticism. The course will thus give an overview of the Romantic movement in primarily Britain and Germany consisting of young, experimenting and later canonized authors and texts, including S.T. Coleridge’s visionary and opium-inspired dreams,  P.B. Shelley’s anti-establishment writing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s remarkably early feminism, William Wordsworth’s nature poetry, William Blake’s fascinating combination of pictures and texts, as well as Jane Austen’s modern prose, Goethe’s cosmopolitanism, the eccentric and extreme Romanticism of Novalis, Heinrich von Kleist, and E.T.A. Hoffmann and not least of the ironic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. It will also show how the discourse of Romanticism travelled around the globe.

Topics:

Historical Background (revolutions and their aftermath)

Central Concepts of Romanticism

The Gothic and the Supernatural

National/transnational

Romantic Love and Gender Politics

Imagination and the Child

Romantic Nature and Ecology

Romanticism and Transcendence (Opium, Hallucination, Dreams)

Romanticism and Global Imagination