76-446 Romanticism

Units: 9.0 Department: English Cross-listed: 76-846 Related URLs: http://hss.cmu.edu/HTML/departments/engl The Romantic period (1789-1832 in Britain) was a volatile era of political and social revolutionsbut also of print revolutions that transformed reading, writing, and publishing. This course focuses the question of books, periodicals, and reading audiences through case studies of three Romantic writers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Walter Scott. Reading their poems, essays, critical theory, and novels in the context of contemporary debates with critics and collaborators, we will aim to understand the relation between print as a set of material forms, on the one hand, and wider efforts to construct what Gramsci and Raymond Williams called cultural hegemony on the other. We will also try to grasp some wider cultural processes at work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These included disintegration of the early modern Republic of Letters and the reconfiguration of its knowledges in the nineteenth-century cultural fields; the forming and division of new reading publics and their ways of reading print; important changes in book production, typography, printing methods (hand-press to steam press), and bookselling; the relation between the aesthetic powers of the text and the material pleasures of the book; the emergence of a modern, imaginative category of literature in conjunction with the consolidating power of the novel; and the shaping of a British national identity founded on a fusion of English and Scottish cultural rivalries. Research papers using rare-book materials at the Hunt or Hillman library Special Collections will be especially encouraged; and the course will sometimes meet in the archive to examine rare and curious modes of print.

Popularity index Rank for this semester: #0 Rank in this department: #0   Students also scheduled 73-100 Principles of Economics 76-462 Advanced Fiction Workshop 76-407 Text, Criticism, Theory: The Case o... 69-130 Tennis 48-095 Architecture for Non-Majors I 79-251 Topics in Anthropology and History 66-501 H&SS Senior Honors Thesis I 79-231 American Foreign Policy 1945-Presen... 76-818 Political Rhetoric 76-461 Personal Essay

Spring 2005 times

No sections available for semester Spring 2005.