ENL 5246 - SUMMER 2026 - KIMBRELL

The nineteenth century in England was an era of enormous social, political, and cultural change. The French Revolution of the 1790s set into motion a series of reactions on British soil, and though its monarchy remained intact, Britain experienced a revolution in its literature that still shapes our present notions of beauty, justice, nature, the formation of individual identity, and the defining qualities of imagination. This course will focus upon the poetry and prose (nonfiction) of England from the late decades of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. The majority of our attention will be directed toward the major poets of this period (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats), but we will also consider prose from Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Edmund Burke.