First-Year Studies: Romanticism and Love

For Percy Shelley, passionate love is the bond that connects us “with every thing which exists”; for Jane Austen, on the other hand, a heroine may lose her heart but not her self-control. It is generally known that Romanticism assigned high value to the emotion of love, but “love” has always been understood in many different ways. This course explores the multiple meanings of love as embodied in the literature of the Romantic period (1780-1830) and its long 19th-century afterglow. To what extent did Romantic attitudes toward desire reflect a reaction against Enlightenment rationality? How did the rise of the so-called companionate marriage change family life? Did the idealization of free love presage a new sexual politics—or simply reinforce the existing social order? Why did Romantic love so often emphasize cruelty and pain and impossible longing? We read poetry, fiction, drama, and polemical prose as a means of approaching such questions and of expanding our conversation, with works by Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Austen, Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, Dickens, Brontë, Wilde, Stoppard, and others.