ENG 319—Eighteenth Century Literature

The content of this course is variable as specified in particular course sections and therefore it is repeatable for credit. The University Grade Repeat Policy does not apply. Poetry and prose in Britain from 1688 to the age of the French Revolution. A: Poetry, Focuses on poetry from 1700 to the 1790s; authors include Pope, Swift, Wordsworth. B: Early Gothic, Focuses on the first examples of the gothic genre in poetry, novels and prose; authors may include Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley. C: Enlightenment Cultures, Consideration of the diverse cultures of the eighteenth century and the formation of the idea of culture in the period. For example 319A: Prof. D. Alff, 18th Century British Poetry What was a poem in eighteenth-century Britain? What did it do or try to do? These are the guiding questions behind this courses survey of English verse written between 1660 and 1800. We will study poems both as self-conscious aesthetic objects possessing certain rhetorical and metrical properties, and as vehicles for public expression. Class discussion and writing assignments will stress the techniques of formal analysis, close reading skills that students can use to make sense of poetic texts from any period. Keeping in mind the mutually-generative relationship between text and cultural context, we will ask why poets adapted certain poetic forms to articulate positions on contemporary issues. How does Alexander Pope’s use of heroic couplets contribute to his vanquishment of literary opponents in The Dunciad? Why does James Grainger draw upon the Virgilian tradition of georgic poetry to salute commercial productivity in the Caribbean? For example 319C: Prof. R. Mack, Culture in 18th Century Britain What is culture and what does it means to study it? We’ll answer this question first by turning to the 18th century in Britain and France when the concept of culture (if not the term itself) came into being. We’ll look at the ways in which writers began to study the customs and habits of other societies and of their own societies. Our texts for doing so will be diverse. We’ll examine closely literature, travel writing, history, and philosophy. In doing so we’ll be especially concerned with the difficulties that arose when writers attempted to understand cultural differences and with the ways in which they called on different kind of writing to represent those differences. How do you distinguish between actions informed by religious belief and actions informed by habit? To what extent can you believe what you see is not clouded by your own beliefs and opinion? What are the criteria for comparing one culture to another? Writers in the eighteenth century asked these questions and it will be central to our project in the course to compare their earlier answers with later answers in anthropology and literature.