From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, writers and intellectuals in western Europe and America felt themselves, in Matthew Arnold's words, "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." The focus of the course will be on the complex and often deeply ambivalent ways in which several of the Romantics and Victorians negotiated this period of transition as questions of belief intertwined themselves with those of history and culture and with private matters of identity and vocation. Two non-English texts-Schiller's On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals-will intellectually frame the course. Other readings include the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the poems and essays of Matthew Arnold, and selections from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville (among others), along with brief secondary readings in criticism, cultural history, and biography Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement.
Course Attributes: FA HUM; EL NC
