This year the Romantics seminar will focus on the radical shift in ideas about literature associated with the Romantic period (c. 1775-1825) of British literature--an era of enormous cultural, political, and artistic innovation and transformation accompanied by equally enormous stresses and strains. That unique combination of factors motivated the writers of the era to reexamine the foundations of their artistic lives and to ask profound questions about the status of literature and its relation to the larger world of love, work, politics, and history. How, these writers wondered, could they justify their very existence as producers of literature? Might poets be, as Shelley wrote with a characteristic display of optimism undercut by doubt, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Was the life of imagination, as Blake supposed, the source of a cultural transformation that could transform the world as we know it? Inspired in part by the radical sociopolitical ideas of the American and French revolutions, the Romantic writers developed the core critical and artistic theories that have become indispensable in our own thinking--originality, imagination, self-expression, nature with a capital N, art with a capital A. Such ideas provide a near-perfect platform for considering other ideas that concern us: self, other, gender, race, etc. Unless we understand what the Romantic writers were up to, we shall not understand ourselves. |