The Aesthetics of British Romanticism, Then and Today

FAIN: FS-50215-09

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Stephen C. Behrendt (Project Director: March 2009 to March 2011)

A five-week college and university teacher seminar for sixteen participants to explore the relations among art, culture, class, and socio-political rhetoric through historical and modern perspectives.

This 5-week Summer Seminar for College Teachers combines a common set of readings and directed discussions with individual research projects to help participants examine extra-literary social, political, economic,moral, gender and class factors involved in literary judgments in Romantic-era Britain (c. 1780-1835) that led to marginalizing or excluding women, laboring-class writers and others and sanctioning a limited and unrepresentative "canon" of writers. Reading primary works of poetry and prose along with contemporary reviews of them, participants will also consider how to revise modern aesthetic criteria in light of the broader and more representative range of Romantic-era authors that recent literary and cultural recovery projects have revealed. The seminar explores the complex relations among art, culture, class, and socio-political rhetoric through historical and modern perspectives that consider "art" as a negotiated ground among its producers, consumers and commentators.