| 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.
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