Program Highlights
Program Dates
June 19 – July 30, 2027
Faculty Director
Professor Shane Peterson, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature
Program Highlights
The British Romantic period (~1789-1834) witnessed both a political revolution, in the overthrow of the French monarchy, and an aesthetic revolution, as the ideas proclaimed in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads upended prevailing literary values. These ideological transformations continue to influence our contemporary ideas about literature, art, politics, and the environment. Notably, insofar as this course is concerned, Romantic attitudes toward the natural world gave rise to modern conservation efforts and environmental movements. Being outside in nature, as the poet John Keats argued, is medicinal—much more than just a pretty backdrop for human affairs. Equally important to the British Romantic imagination was London, which was the epicenter of the rapid Western industrialization and modernization occurring during this period. Several prominent Romantic figures, including William Blake, made London their home despite expressing negative opinions about the city’s effects in their writing. The metropolis offered the culture and resources unavailable in more rural environments. Concurrently, Jane Austen’s work focused on the changing fortunes of a landowning class that, while reaping the profits of colonialism and agrarian capitalism, was driven by an ethos of landscape ‘improvement.’
In this course we will explore how landscape shapes literary imagination and how ideas about nature, place, and the environment developed from the Romantic period through the Victorian era and into the early Modernist period. Our time will be split between London, which offers an abundance of historical, literary, and artistic sites which will enrich our understanding of Romanticism’s historical context, and Oxford, nestled in a bucolic rural setting and showcasing a storied academic tradition. We will also visit the Lake District, which was home to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, Coleridge, and other Romantic figures, and has been preserved as a national park. We thus have the unique opportunity to study the literature and aesthetics of this period in the environment that profoundly influenced its core values. We will read, discuss, and write about major literary and philosophical works from the Romantic, Victorian, and early Modernist periods to examine how attitudes toward the nonhuman world developed in literature, science, and the visual arts from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. We will also examine how Romantic ideas continued to shape Victorian and Modernist writers and how many of the movement’s foundational ideas about nature, imagination, and place continue to influence literature and environmental thought today.
In addition to studying the literature of the period, we will take multiple excursions (to borrow the title of one of Wordsworth’s early poems) through London, the rural surroundings of Oxford, and the Lake District, often following the very paths that the Romantics walked, bringing with us our texts, notebooks, pencils, and sensibilities sharpened by the landscape. We will also visit museums and cultural sites such as the Tate Britain, Keats House, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, and Dove Cottage in the Lake District.
