Romanticism and reason in the long eighteenth century

In this unit you will explore the revolution in thought that commenced in the eighteenth century and developed in the early nineteenth century, a movement that changed the course of literature. Texts both inform and are shaped by the debates of their age. New kinds of literature emerge. Innovative works embody and represent dialogues that were central to their historical contexts: dialogues between irrationality and reason, emotion and restraint, the familiar and the new, and Gothic and pastoral modes. You will study a range of innovative texts which connected literature with history, philosophy, and the visual arts. As modern readers, we can choose to encounter such texts aesthetically or as a means of gaining insight into the past. Depending on staff availability, you will primarily focus on either the rise of the Romantic aesthetic in literature, or on the concerns of the Romantic movement at its maturity.