WFU Lifelong Learning Series: Great Literature of the British Romantic Era

Great Literature of the British Romantic Era

Eric Wilson, PhD

Tuesdays 4 pm – 6 pm, July 5 – August 9

Brookstown Campus

No period in English literature has produced more literary geniuses than the Romantic Age.  Between 1789 and 1832, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats created undoubtable masterpieces that continue to shape how we understand the individual, imagination, nature, and language.  In this course, we will certainly gain an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts that influenced these six poets, but we will mostly engage with the wonders of their verse.  Each of our classes will be dedicated to a particular poet’s life and work, beginning with Blake and his visionary prophecies and concluding with Keats and his elegaic odes.  In each case, in an age that valued originality and rebellion, the biography is almost as fascinating as the literature.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University.  He is the author of several books on Romanticism, including How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats, My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing, and Coleridge’s Melancholia: An Anatomy of Limbo.  He has also published distinguished literary nonfiction, such as Keep It Fake, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, and Against Happiness.  His essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The Oxford American, The New York Times, The LA Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.  For his work, he has garnered many awards, including a National Humanities Center Fellowship and a Choice Best Academic Book of the Year.