Module Information

This seminar series has been designed to allow students to study in some depth the ideological debates that occurred in late eighteenth-century Britain. It focuses on the British intellectual dichotomy of the 1790s: between radical enlightenment thought and the rise of romanticism. Following the outbreak of the French Revolution, radical thinkers and movements emerged in all parts of the British Isles. In Wales, Iolo Morganwg's forgeries gave life to a new imagined nation. Scotland saw Robert Burns's more whimsical nationalism find favour at the same time as the emergence of working-class popular radicalism. In Ireland, the United Irish movement - formed on enlightened principles - allied with the sectarian Defenders and attempted to overthrow British rule in the 1798 Rebellion. English radicalism was divided by the brutal excesses of the French `Terror'; the enlightened thought of the likes of Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price finding itself opposed to the romantic notions of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey. This interdisciplinary course will explore radical strains of political thought in the revolutionary period, both in a British context and that of its individual constituent nations, utilising a wide variety of source materials, including literary and visual evidence.

This module equips students to investigate a formative period in the intellectual history of the British Isles in depth, through the analysis of sources of different types in combination with an up-to-date appraisal of historical interpretations of the period