ENGL 524 A: Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Literature

A graduate survey of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830), introducing key works, authors, and contemporary critical approaches, with special attention to subjects like the material text, gender, social class, travel and empire, consumer culture, and the rise of the modern novel. We will cover a range of genres (drama, poetry, fiction), represented by lesser-known examples as well as classics like The Rape of the Lock, Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera, Joseph Andrews, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice. Students can expect to come out of the course with a good command of the primary material and of current critical discourses and research methods in the field, along with some sense of how the literature and culture of this period relate both to what came before, in Shakespeare’s time, and to the Victorian and modern periods that followed. No previous experience is assumed.