The Reign of Terror: Fear and Loathing in Romantic Literature (Postgraduate)

This course explores literature of the Romantic period (1790-1830) in Britain in relation to the aesthetics and politics of 'terror.' *This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited This course concentrates mainly on the relationship between the aesthetic category of the sublime and the political climate of fear created by the Reign of Terror in France in the mid-1790s and intensified by the revolutionary wars in Europe. The course explores how ideas and perceptions of terror fed into romantic literature, and how romantic literature in turn helped to reshape notions of fear. Through reading primary texts and examining contemporary images (such as paintings, engravings, and magazine illustrations) students will develop an enhanced understanding of the connections between the romantic language of terror and other topics, including millenarianism, anti-jacobinism, spectatorship, codes of visuality, prophecy, pantheism, materiality, subjectivity, friendship, domesticity, the Gothic, the body, imagination, sexuality, and liminality. The course will begin with an introductory session outlining the main themes and writers on the course, and close with a seminar addressing the relevance of notions of terror and the sublime to (post)modern culture and society. Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate