Course Description |
British literature of the Romantic period, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, displays a fascination with what is on the margins. This manifests itself most memorably in the unprecedented focus on socially marginalized figures – the beggars, madmen, abandoned women, and solitary wanderers who populate the pages of Romantic poetry and fiction. The author too is often figured as an outsider in this period, someone whose authority derives specifically from his or her position of marginality, looking in from the fringes. Geographically, the peripheries of the island of Great Britain (Wales and especially Scotland) were major sites of literary experimentation in the Romantic era, while the south coast of England attracted particular interest because of the constant threat of invasion from France during these years. And of course Romantic writers famously exploited textual margins: many of the major literary works of the period make innovative use of footnotes, glosses, and other paratextual apparatus. This course considers these various aspects of Romantic marginality and the intersections between them. In addition to the work of more canonical authors (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley), we will be reading poems, novels, essays, and letters by writers, especially women, whose work has historically been marginalized.
|