Ghosts of Romanticism

Romanticism is haunting you.

It’s there in every Byronic hero you’ve ever fallen for and the compulsively readable Gothic novels you’ve devoured under your quilt until 3am. It’s woven through all the medieval fantasy worlds you’ve wanted to wrap around you like a cloak and live in. And it’s right behind your shoulder every time you’ve stood in front of a jagged mountain, a torrential waterfall, a shoreline broken by giant rocks that you can’t help but climb and then instantly feel almost embarrassingly overcome by emotion.

It’s the thrum in every line of poetry you’ve ever considered tattooing across your wrist.

None of this is new. Two-hundred years ago, a bunch of writers, thinkers, and professional feelings-havers laid the groundwork with their poems, essays, and frankly torrid personal lives.

But Romanticism never really ended. It’s still here, still running the show in your stories, your memories, your wardrobe, and your social media feeds.

You already know what Romanticism feels like... this course will teach you why it resonates so deeply.

The ghosts of Romanticism are everywhere.
This October, let’s chase them together.

Welcome to...

5 live gatherings this October

Replays included

No prior knowledge required

Ghosts of Romanticism is a 5-week course with four core lectures and one bonus lecture that combines folklore, history, poetry, and cultural analysis to create a kaleidoscope that reveals how two-hundred-year-old ideas are still shaping the world – the things you value most, what you fear, and the way you imagine the past and the future.

You’ll learn to see the Romantic bones underneath the stories, aesthetics, and trends you already love and understand exactly why they still have such a hold on you.

If you have a soft spot for brooding men in overcoats and ivy-covered walls, a willingness to read some completely gorgeous (and occasionally unhinged) poetry, and genuine curiosity about the Romantic folkloric past that feeds your contemporary obsessions, you’re going to love this.

Whether you have a tattered copy of Lyrical Ballads full of wild annotations in the margins or you’ve never read a Romantic poem in your life, you’ll learn to trace a throughline from the Romantics to that billowing blouse in your closet that makes you feel chic and poetic as hell to your favorite Taylor Swift song and so much more.

You’ll come away able to name the artistic, folkloric, deeply emotional forces that make up Romanticism and understand exactly how and why they’re haunting you.

And, more than that, you'll come away sounding like you know what you're talking about. Because you will. You'll be the friend who can explain exactly why the cottagecore fantasy runs so deep, why the crumbling castle feels like an open door, why Byron ruined men for all of us... and you'll say it with the kind of confidence that comes from having actually done the reading and thinking in community.

Each week of the course will feature a deep dive into one of these topics...

Dreaming Up the Past:
Distressed Genres, Nostalgia, and the Romantic Imagination

Romanticism and the study of folklore are twins, born at the same time, playmates in the same nursery. We’ll show you how Romanticism and folklore grew up together through forays into early Romantic poetry’s depiction of the “folk” and the true history behind manuscripts like Ossian (the fake epic that took England by storm.) And we’ll explore similar contemporary outlets like trad wives, the cottagecore aesthetic, and other rustic fantasies.

Live on Thursday, October 8th at 7PM ET!
[Replay available within 24 hours after recording.]

Tall, Dark, and Brooding:
Byron and the Byronic Hero

Meet the original moody fictional heartthrob, and the real man who made him. We'll trace how Byron became notorious, even legendary, and the ways he was both a model for and the creator of the Byronic hero that has never gone out of style. We’ll also talk about Letitia Elizabeth Landon, or L.E.L, the woman who out-Byroned Byron in their lifetimes. Key Romantic texts will prompt you to think about how gender, brooding, and bad boys collide – and how Byron is still wrecking men for us today.

Live on Thursday, October 15th at 7PM ET!
[Replay available within 24 hours after recording.]

Romanticism vs. the Gothic:
The Sublime, Terror, and Horror

You know the feeling you get when you’re standing at the sheer edge of a cliff, dirt crumbling away beneath your toes as you stare down hundreds of feet at the foaming, rioting waves smashing into the rocks, salt water misting your lips? That’s the sublime as the Romantics understood it. We’ll dig into the primal and intellectual force of the sublime, consider how the Gothic complicates the picture, and ask whether "sublime terror," "Gothic terror," and plain old horror can actually be separated.

Live on Thursday, October 22nd at 7PM ET!
[Replay available within 24 hours after recording.]

Ghosts of Medievalism:
The Past as Wished For

Romanticism resurrected the medieval past for its own purposes - and we're still copying that resurrection, reinventing an imagined medieval world that can fulfill our 21st-century desires. We'll trace the line from Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" all the way to Y2K medieval movies (think A Knight's Tale and Ever After) and the ways “Romantic medievalism” has infiltrated pop culture, fashion, and children’s novels. It's ghosts all the way down.

Live on Thursday October 29th at 7PM ET!
[Replay available within 24 hours after recording.]

Bonus Lecture:
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

An iconic work of Romanticism. A key Gothic text. The first true science fiction novel. These are just some of the superlatives attached to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel the author began at the age of 18 and published at 20. Pulling threads from previous weeks, we’ll explore Mary Shelley’s genius distillation of Romanticism and how Frankenstein constructs the past, the future, motherhood, intellectualism, and monstrosity… and why her Halloween monster continues to haunt us to this day.

Live on Monday, November 2nd at 7PM ET!
[Replay available 24 hours after recording.]

The Gates of Carterhaugh Are Open For...

$397

EARLY BIRD!

Available Until 9/14 at Midnight ET!!

$427

Full Payment

2 payments of $225/month

2-Month Payment Plan

4 payments of $115/month

4-Month Payment Plan

NOTE: All of the course readings will be available online, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but if you would like to purchase your own book copy, we highly recommend the Norton Critical edition edited by J. Paul Hunter. The revised Penguin Classics edition edited by Maurice Hindle is also a great choice!

Norton Critical Edition

Penguin Classics Edition

This isn’t a syllabus you’re going to get quizzed on.

We’re folklorists and lit nerds, not gatekeepers.

These poems, dreamers, and stories aren’t dusty artifacts. They’re still having a powerful pull on the way you love, the things you fear, and the ways that you imagine the past – and the world today. Understanding Romanticism (and its impact) makes so many things actually make sense.

And you won't be doing this alone, either. Every week, you'll be in a (very cozy, slightly spooky) virtual room with other people who also try to recreate Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (pictured here) every time they go to the beach. People who also own more than one copy of Frankenstein. People who understand.

Sure, you could buy a Norton anthology of Romanticism and read it on your own. But being part of a Carterhaugh course isn't just about the scholarship (though we've got that covered.) It's about laughing crazily during the live discussion while the chat goes wild making fun of a bizarre line of poetry. It's confessing your most out-there theory about Coleridge in a Circle post and having three people respond "omg, I was JUST thinking that!" It's having somewhere to go on Thursday night where everyone is as excited about L.E.L. and fake Scottish epics as you are.

Some people just get haunted by this stuff.

This course will show you why – and which ghosts to exorcise and which to feed.

Ghosts of Romanticism is a 5-week live course with four core lectures and one bonus lecture that meets weekly on (mostly) Thursday nights from October 8th to November 2nd. We encourage you to come live if at all possible - there’s nothing like the Carterhaugh community - but there will be replays posted within 24 hours of each live meeting because timezones are real and life happens.

What's Included

Four core LIVE video lectures about the week's key concepts. Expect college-level discussions, complex topics in accessible language, time for Q&As, and a sense of humor.
One LIVE bonus lecture all about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (and its modern adaptations!)
Weekly readings - we're talking everything from Coleridge's opium-inspired half-finished masterpieces to L.E.L.'s proto-feminist musings and Wordsworth's misguided attempts to become part of "the folk." It's going to be a wild ride.
Access to an exclusive Circle community exclusively for students of Ghosts of Romanticism. This moderated space will include weekly discussion questions.
A custom workbook with prompts and reflections to help you think like a Romantic, in the best way possible.
An extensive further reading list to deepen your study.

This isn't just a course. It's five weeks of being delightfully obsessed in good company. It's spinning out in the chat over whether Geraldine is a vampire or a fairy. It's hanging out with people who also see ruins and can't decide if they need to stare at them or climb them first, think Bryon's secretly kinda hot (#problematic), and actually get your snarky comments about Wordsworth.

Click here to read more testimonials!

Your Teachers

We, Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman, are award-winning folklorists, teachers, and writers with a combined 26 years in higher education, two streaming series on The Great Courses+, and over 150 publications (including our new book, Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk!) Together, we founded The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, teaching creative souls how to re-enchant their lives through folklore and fairy tales. In 2019, Carterhaugh won the Dorothy Howard Award from the American Folklore Society.

When we aren’t teaching at Carterhaugh, we're scholars, writers and best friends who have published peer-reviewed articles, appeared on podcasts, sold stories and poems, written book introductions and encyclopedia entries, and written for magazines and blogs. (We’ve also been known to crush “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at karaoke.) We're regular writers for Enchanted Living Magazine, and we also deliver sold-out lectures at venues like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Profs & Pints series, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, and FaerieCon.

We love teaching. Our classes reflect the joy we get out of the strange and delightful world of folklore. We take scholarship seriously, believe in clear communication over jargon-speak, deeply value our community, and laugh a lot.

**You'll love this if...**

You’ve ever wandered lonely as a cloud

You love learning about the philosophies and antics of brilliant, bizarre artists and visionaries of the past

You’re fascinated by the ways that history shapes current aesthetics, trends, and obsessions

You like your scholarship rigorous and your poets mildly unhinged

You have Opinions about Frankenstein adaptations

You've always wanted to read poetry but worry you aren't “good” at it.

You miss the particular joy of learning something just because it fascinates you.

You would very much like to spend October talking about ghosts, terror, clouds, ruined castles, Ever After, and resurrected dudes with people who care about these things as much as you do.

You don't need to know anything about Romanticism yet. You just need to feel the pull. If you're curious, a little poetically-minded, into juicy historical gossip (Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, enough said), and love excavating the folkloric treasures of the past to understand our world today, you’re going to love Ghosts of Romanticism.

This isn't for you if...

You think Keats sucks (how dare you)

You have zero tolerance for Romantic poetry

You’re looking for a straightforward literature survey with a syllabus to check off – we started our own school so we could be true to the mix of scholarship, magic, and creativity we felt called to make, not to replicate exactly what we taught at universities

You are an aspiring trad wife (we have some bad news for you)

FAQ

"I know NOTHING about Romanticism... but I am intrigued. Should I still take this?" - There is absolutely no experience required for this course. If it's calling to you, the Romantic ghosts have something they want you to hear.
"I know a LOT about Romanticism... why is this course still for me?" - Honestly, we've never seen what we're offering in this course before! Even if you're very familiar with negative capability, regularly court the sublime, and have the Big Six on lockdown, we think that this course will teach you to look at this work in a new, folklorically-informed way. If you love Romanticism and want to immerse yourself in it for five glorious weeks, you will find value here.
"Um, what exactly IS Carterhaugh?" - The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic is an award-winning online school dedicated to classes on fairy tales, folklore, and all things fantastic. It was created by Sara and Brittany in 2016 as a place for those who dreamed of elven battles while studying economics, those who have always sworn they could see ghosts, and those who longed for a school of magic to send them an unexpected acceptance letter. We aim to use our knowledge and passion for these subjects to share their wonder, solidify their importance in society, and spread a bit of magic into the world. Want to know more? Check out our "About" page by clicking here!
"When will I get the first lesson?" - Our first live session will happen on Thursday, 10/8 at 7PM ET, with subsequent live meetings on the subsequent Thursdays - 10/15, 10/22, and 10/29. The bonus lecture on Frankenstein will be on Monday, 11/2 at 7PM ET. And yes, they will be recorded if you can't make them live! Other lesson materials, each week's workbook pages, etc. will become available as we go through the course. The Circle group will be available starting 10/5.
"What if I can't come to the live discussion?" - You do NOT have to watch the videos on any specific date, nor attend any live session, as they will all be recorded and available for you to view later. We really aim to make this course accessible whenever is best for you. That said, our live meetings tend to be a LOT of fun, and we do encourage you to come live and participate in real time when you can!
"What if I hate this? Is there a refund policy?" - Please understand that we do not offer refunds. (You're not gonna hate this, we promise.)

Other questions? Contact us at theprofs@carterhaughschool.com!

Click here to read more testimonials!

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The Gates of Carterhaugh are Open For...

$397