Courses

Love forms a central concern of the writings of almost all eras and cultures, but it features with particular prominence in nineteenth-century British literature. The most powerful model of love during this period was the one promulgated by Romantic writers and philosophers, beginning in the late eighteenth century. But that model coexisted with earlier conceptions, notably those of Sappho and Plato, whose writings on love were enthusiastically revived and revisited over the course of the nineteenth century. In this course we will examine works in a variety of genres – lyric and narrative poems, novels, treatises, confessional memoirs, transcripts and translations – in light of these shifting conceptions of love.