By focusing on the fascination, anxiety and resistance that characterizes the Romantic understanding of Greece, this course will introduce students to Romantic Hellenism through an encounter with a range of writers across many genres, poetry, fiction, essays and travel writing. It will examine the selected literary and aesthetic works in the light of the historical circumstances in which they were produced: the rise of Greece as the supreme cultural and aesthetic model in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain; the movement of British Romanticism, which sought to question established cultural images; the arrival of the Parthenon sculptures enchanting the British writers and artists, many of whom, however, deplored their removal; the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 making Hellas the realm in which imagination and politics could converge.
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2018