Romanticism and Revolution

In our present time of quickly accelerating technological, economic, and social change paired with powerful government repression of revolutionary ideas and actions, we might wish to ask, with an eye to history: how have others survived similar moments? In this seminar, we’ll dive into another such time of acceleration: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain, described in literary history as the Romantic period. Buffeted by the winds of revolution blowing in from North America, France, and Haiti, as well as by the industrial revolution and developing colonial project transforming their local landscape and social structures, British writers and thinkers of this period–the Romantics–grappled with questions of political organization, social change, and ecological transformation.

In this seminar, we’ll read the work of several major writers of the Romantic period with an eye, specifically, to the ways their poetry and prose grapple with their revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) moment. We’ll begin with an immersion in the 1789-1791 “pamphlet war,” in which English writers including Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft debated the dangers and benefits of the French revolution’s first phase. We’ll ask how these writers understood the stakes of that revolution’s social and political transformation–and, in particular, how they understood both the revolutionary re-shaping of the social contract and the revolutionary concepts of “liberty” and “rights.” Then, we’ll turn to three sets of poetic texts of the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century: William Blake’s “America” (written in 1793), segments of the 1805 draft of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and a small number of politically-focused Wordsworth sonnets from 1802-1807. As we read these texts, we’ll ask how these writers responded to both the idealism and the violence of the French, American, and Haitian revolutions, and how their engagement with revolutionary hopes (and revolutionary disappointments) shaped both their own literary and political trajectories and the longer shadows cast by their writing.

We’ll then turn to texts by the next generation of Romantic writers, whose work was shaped by the intervening decades of government repression, as well as by the massive social shifts inaugurated by industry, urbanization, empire, and the widespread privatization of the enclosure movement. We’ll discuss Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819), a poetic response to the 1819 massacre of working-class demonstrators in Manchester. Reading Shelley’s much-quoted poem in the context of its contemporary class-based political organizing, we’ll think about the political uses of poetry and the role of the poet in moments of government-sanctioned violence. We’ll turn, at last, to the self-taught working-class poet John Clare, reading several of his anti-enclosure poems. As an unlanded agricultural laborer, Clare was directly employed in the enclosure of his Midlands village–an enclosure he returned to frequently in his writing, vividly describing both the human and the environmental costs of the transformed landscape. As we read Clare’s writing, we’ll consider the radical potential of description as a poetic mode that indexes social and ecological change within the landscapes of the capitalocene, both in the nineteenth century and today.

We’ll scaffold our reading of the primary texts discussed above with the work of historians (E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm) and literary critics (possibly including Anne Janowitz, Celeste Langan, Jerome McGann, and/or Alan Liu).