Course Description: Responding to increasing levels of individual and social freedom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Europe, the vanguard culture of Modernity, enters a period of revolutions—intellectual, political, industrial/economic, and artistic.  Romanticism is the name we give to the artistic revolution of this era. British Romanticism is notable for its poetry, and we will read a number of canonical works by Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats.  Continental Romanticism is predominately Germanic: philosophical and musical as well as literary; in this class we will turn our attention to the music of Beethoven, and to the philosophy of Hegel.  For our finale, we will read Mary Shelley’s novelistic exploration/critique of Romanticism, Frankenstein.