ROMANTICISM & FREEDOM

“Freedom” was perhaps the central watchword of Romantic-era Britain, yet this concept remains notoriously difficult to pin down. Taking a cue from the sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, who writes that “freedom is one those of values better experienced than defined,” this seminar will explore the variegated experiences of freedom and its opposites in the literature of British Romanticism. Romanticism unfolds alongside major revolutions in America, France, and Haiti, and we will begin by examining how the differing conceptions of freedom offered in the wake of these revolutions and their receptions galvanized writers and thinkers in Britain. From here, we will probe the expressions, possibilities, implications, and limits of freedom as outlined in various domains: political, individual, aesthetic, economic, philosophical, religious, and beyond. In situating Romanticism alongside developments like revolution, the rise of globalization, and the Atlantic slave trade, we will be particularly interested in confronting how the explosion of claims to freedom in this period emerges together with and in response to the proliferation of enslaved, colonized, and otherwise constrained or hindered bodies.

As we read poems, novels, slave narratives, philosophical essays, political tracts and documents, and more, a fundamental question for the course will concern the relation between binary terms: to what extent, and how, do notions of freedom in Romanticism depend on the necessary exclusion of the unfree? Since the Romantic age sees the birth of concepts of freedom still prevalent in our own day, this course will offer an opportunity to reflect critically on the present. To that end, we will take up some contemporary theoretical analyses and critiques of freedom, both directly in relation to Romanticism and reaching beyond.