Welcome

Amidst massive political and social upheaval, Romantic period authors were awakened to the importance of the past for both the immediate present and the hoped-for future. In its many forms—historical novels, lyric meditations on childhood, essays on memory and forgetting, poems celebrating classical antiquity, and chivalric romances infused with irony and nostalgia—”looking back” was a quintessential Romantic activity. This survey will take up canonical and lesser-known works to examine the effect of thinking historically on literary writing from 1780-1830. Through poetry and prose by William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, John Keats, and Jane Austen, we will consider how literary authors used and abused the “facts” of history, how they envisioned and created personal, national, and global pasts, and where their ideas of history, memory, and individuality converge.