Browse Hierarchy ESH6041: Guillotines, Ghosts and Laughing Gas: Literature in the 1790s

The 1790s was a turbulent decade in which literature, politics, and science interacted in unprecedented ways. Romantic innovations in poetry coincided with a cult of Gothic horror, dramatic discoveries in science, and an explosive pamphlet war unleashed by the French Revolution. This module explores the distinctive culture of the revolutionary decade, studying poems, novels, and plays by Coleridge, Blake, Charlotte Smith, `Monk¿ Lewis and other writers alongside Jacobin and anti-Jacobin polemics, political cartoons, and experiments with `laughing gas¿ in the laboratories of the poet-chemist Humphry Davy.