In certain ways, we regard artists, poets, musicians and actors, the figures associated with the production of our collective fantasies and their complicated pleasures, as living embodiments of the fantasies that they produce for us. The Romantic poets presented themselves as prophets, legislators and priests of the senses and were, in some measure, regarded as such by their public. In this course we will consider how the fantasies promulgated in the works of these poets spilled over into a popular fascination with the lives and celebrity of the artists themselves. In particular, we will investigate how the popular imagination of the life of celebrity becomes a venue in which are constructed political fantasies of improbably good and bad worlds. In this context, we will investigate the place such artists were able to construct for themselves in the political and moral world at large. Beyond this, we shall be concerned with the similarities of such celebrity to the fame and/or notoriety of moral and political leaders. To what extent are poets leaders and to what extent must politicians be some form of artist? We will examine the shady collusion of the leisure and political lives under the following two problematics.

I) First, we'll explore the intersection of Romantic poetry and Romantic politics focussing on the common properties of the political and the artistic imagination. We will pay special attention to the manner in which utopian and dystopian fantasies and their pleasures and displeasures are common to the political and artistic imaginations. What is the relation of entertainment to visions of better or worse worlds? Here we'll consider how Romantic poetry uses such fantasies to examine and either affirm or eschew particular historical values associated with matters of ideology, hegemony, empire, nationalism, revolution, moral issues and religious traditions.

II) Secondly, we'll consider the similarities of the figures of artists and politicians both as public personae and as literary representations. In this part of the course, we will focus on the persona of Lord Byron as the convergence of artist, celebrity and political figure: both in his own performance or self-representation of these roles; and in the various modifications that Byron's self-presentation undergoes in the works of other writers--particularly novelists and journalists. The persona of Byron is presented variously as prophet, reformer, liberator, libertine, vampire, cad and cheat. How is it that Byron becomes such a central figure in an extraordinary interplay of utopian promises (abundance, intensity, spontaneity and community) and dystopian bargains (exhaustion, scarcity, monotony, alienation and social fragmentation)? The entertainment industry may be an arena in which the utopian fantasies of art invade the reality of social interchange and challenge that reality to take on the quality of its fantasies. If this is so, are the dark aspects of Romanticism that emerge in the garish and Gothic extremes of the Byron figure necessary as correctives to visions that are too ideal? Are utopian expectations supported or belied by their promulgation through the medium of the novel? Is the entertainment industry itself a utopian or dystopian force?

Part One (eight weeks)

William Blake, " Songs of Innocence and Experience," "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." "America".
William Wordsworth, Selections from The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan."
Lord Byron: "Prometheus," Cain , Manfred , selections from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan .
Percy Shelley: "The Triumph of Life, "Julian and Maddalo," Prometheus Unbound , "A Defense of Poetry."
John Keats: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," Odes.

Part Two (seven weeks)

Mary Shelley: The Last Man .
Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon .
John Polidori: "The Vampyre".
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre .

Additional material on Byron drawn from contemporary newspaper articles, editorial cartoons, biographies, correspondence, etc.