British Romanticism and the Environmental Humanities: Poetry and Fiction in the Context of History and Theory, CEC

In this advanced course, we will discuss a range of texts written in the period of Romanticism (≈ 1780-1830) with a focus on the ways in which these texts construct the relationship between the human and the non-human world. We will deal with canonical and with lesser-known authors, and we will look at texts from various genres – poems, non-fictional and fictional prose. Central concepts developed in the romantic age (the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque, imagination, etc.) are brought into contact with critical approaches and terms that have gained currency in the 21^st century (environmental humanities and ecocriticism, Anthropocene, nature, wilderness, new materialism, ecopoetics). This confrontation of ideas serves to throw into relief the importance of the romantic age to our own ways of imagining the entanglement of the human and the more-than-human world.  Texts will be made available via Stud.IP.