2020-2021

Irish literature in English from Swift to Anna Burns (Milkman), including Thomas Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney); Irish Cinema including films by John Ford, Neil Jordan, John Huston, Ken Loach, Lenny Abramson, Jim Sheridan, Kirsten Sheridan, John Crowley.

Our survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (especially the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will also address foundational and recent critical-theoretical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic and dangerously erotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism of the naturalist Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” and the (literal) fruits of empire and vegetarianism.