LFU:online

This seminar gives a broad overview of the most important works and authors of American Romanticism in their cultural and historical contexts.

Romanticism is a formative era in US-American cultural history whose influence persists until today. This period saw the development of a unique literary aesthetics that was as diverse as it was contradictory, and which served national identity formation as much as it complicated and challenged it. This seminar offers an introduction to canonical texts and their contexts (Dickinson, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman), addressing philosophical and political aspects such as abolitionism, transcendentalism, feminism, and an early environmental movement.

weekly mandatory readings, discussion

class participation, seminar paper

All texts except the following will be available as PDFs on OLAT. Please get any English-language edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden once you are registered for the class.

for the Bachelor Program (612): positive completion of compulsory module 10
for BA Lehramt (457): positive completion of compulsory module 13