In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his powerful satire on philosophical, political and social orthodoxies, William Blake wrote that "As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives." He called for a breaking of restraints, for a revolution in human perceptions, and for "Enough! Or Too much." We will explore this revolutionary impulse in aesthetic, artistic, social and political spheres throughout the Romantic Era (1789-1832). The rise of the Gothic, the emergence of the concept of poetic genius, the "revolution in female manners" described by Wollstonecraft, the movement for the abolition of slavery, and the influence of the sublime all opened transformative visions of art and the human experience. Throughout the course, we will examine works by Ann Radcliffe, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and others, contextualizing these figures against background readings on the sublime, the cult of sensibility, Gothicism, and the failure of the French Revolution.
