ENG 462 - Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic

Instructor
Vaz

For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.”  In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period.  By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

462B The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic

lnstructor
Vaz

There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read.  That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception.  Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama.  In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760’s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worth of scholarship only in the last 30 years of the twentieth century.

Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.