近期活動

[Abstract]

The title of Marilyn Butler’s seminal critical work, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, published in 1981, reminds the student of English Romanticism of the revolutionary spirit that fired not only the overtly atheist, reformist, anti-monarchist Shelley, but also Blake and Wordsworth. In this lecture, I shall meticulously examine two very different calls to arms: Blake’s Songs of Innocence poem ‘Holy Thursday’ and Shelley’s sonnet ‘England in 1819’. In the former, Blake launches a broadside at the exploitative regimentation of the eighteenth-century charity schools, while Shelley invokes the spirit of revolution needed to topple the monarchy and void the government of its self-serving ministers.