This graduate course will treat British Romanticism as a background for American Romanticism. The focus will be on themes or motifs and how they were expressed on both sides of the Atlantic. Examples of themes include organicism, the Faust and Wandering Jew figures, phrenology and physiognomy, spiritualism, the radical individual, imagination and reason, and Napoleon. From the American perspective, the key writers are Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Carlyle; and the American Romantics we will focus on are Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. In addition to common readings in the mainstream tradition, each student will focus on the careers of one British and one American writer. This is a general-purpose reading course - no massive writing assignments.

Readings

• Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, Signet, 0-451-52332-6
• DeQuincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Dover 0-486-28742-4
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, Houghton-Mifflin 0-395-05112-6
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. House of the Seven Gables, Penguin 0-14-039005-7
• POE, Edgar Allan, Fall of the House of Usher and other tales, Signet 0-451-52675-9
• Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, Bantam 0-553-21116-1
• Bloom Harold and Lionel Trilling, eds., Romantic Poetry and Prose, Oxford 0-19-501615-7
•  
• Carlyle, Thomas, Selected writings, Penguin 0-14-043065-2
• Fuller, Margaret, Portable Margaret Fuller, Penguin 0-14-017665-9
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Young Goodman Brown and other tales, Oxford 0-19-283600-5
• Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Favorite poems, Dover 0-486-27273-7

Return to the Home page

Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://English.cla.umn.edu/FacultyProfiles/Ross/Courses/
Please send comments to: Donald Ross
Last revised 15 November 1999

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1999.