Romanticism Then and Now: Travelling Tales and Intertextual Dialogues

The course intends to examine the modalities and forms in which Romanticism (in terms of thought, poetics, aesthetics and languages) persists in twentieth-century and contemporary British literature. To this end, starting from theoretical considerations concerning the concepts of intertextuality or transtextuality in postmodern discourse, the course will first of all introduce students to Romanticism and specific texts and authors (Wordsworth, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Byron) to focus then on how some writers have interpreted, translated and revisited their 19th-century predecessors through textual adaptations and reprises (Neil Gunn, P.D. James, Val McDermid, Emma Tennant, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Benjamin Markovits).