“Revolutions”, the Italian historian Enzo Traverso has written, “are history breathing in and out”. Traverso’s organic metaphor offers one (though by no means the only) understanding of what makes a historical event revolutionary; by the same token, Traverso’s metaphor reminds us of the rich ‘poetic’ quality of much revolutionary action. In this seminar, co-taught by Professor Kohlmann (British Studies) and Dr Steltz (German Studies), we will explore the conjunction of literary production and revolutionary action in the two-hundred-year period from the eighteenth century to late twentieth. We will ask: How do writers render the feverish and stormy charge of revolution—what the Victorian author Thomas Carlyle (writing of the French Revolution) called “the event of events”? How do they give expression to the hopes and frustrations associated with radical social change? Poets, prose writers, and dramatists we considered in this class include William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, Georg Büchner, William Morris, W. H Auden, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Theorists and historians of revolution treated in the class are likely to range from Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt to Enzo Traverso, Jonathan Flatley, and Bini Adamczak.
