The
Romantic Period in Britain (1770-1830) was an era of collectors—aristocrats
invested huge sums in damaged Etruscan vases and rusty Roman medals, middle
class women pressed and labeled weeds with Latin binomials, and Walter Scott
built a gothic mansion from the gathered remnants of ruined Scottish abbeys.
Poets, too, collected themselves and became collectables, sometimes
inadvertently: the “Lake School” was originally intended as an insult, but it
came to define a powerful triumvirate of poets. This course will examine two
related topics: the practices of collecting in Britain from 1770-1830, and the
poetry that came to define British Romanticism as a literary movement.
We’ll
begin several of the most prominent collecting practices (scientific voyages,
picturesque tourism, and local history) of the era to raise a series of
questions fundamental to the course: what function do collections serve? To
order nature, to preserve the past, to consolidate self, class, nation? What do
they express? Desire, anxiety, a drive to order, the embrace of chaos? What is
the relationship between person and animal? Between collector and specimen?
Observer and observed? We’ll then move into a series of case studies, reading Romantic-era
poems in the context of contemporary writing about collecting. Across
three units centered on scientific, historical, and literary collecting, we’ll
consider how things become (or resist becoming) objects by way of their
incorporation into systems of representation (whether Linnaean taxonomy,
topographical history, a library catalogue, or poetic genres). To get a broad
overview of poetry in the period, we’ll read canonical poets William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Lord Byron alongside some
of their lesser known contemporaries—including Charlotte Smith, Robert Leslie
Bowles, and Robert Southey—as well as authors, like Walter Scott and Matthew
“Monk” Lewis, who are better known as novelists. Upon completing the course
work, you will have studied many of the major authors and prominent poetic forms of the
period, and have analyzed Romantic literature in relation to larger cultural, social,
and scientific developments of the time.
