This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module explores the eighteenth century fascination with bodies and the truths (or lies) bodies were supposed to reveal. Our focus will be on the ways in which the body is read and constructed in eighteenth-century literature and how these readings and constructions reflect various concerns about class, race, gender and sexuality. Efforts to regulate the body (particularly the female, plebeian and racialised body) became the focus of many reformers and philanthropists in the period who sought to recuperate the productive (and reproductive) labour of idle or transgressive bodies to serve the nation's moral and financial economies. Other writers, however, emphasised the body's potential to work against social and cultural norms, focusing on events such as the masquerade, in which women dressed as men and aristocrats as chimney sweeps.
Through the course of this module we will examine a range of literary representations of the body which seek both the control the body and to celebrate its disruptive potential. We will read texts from a variety of genres including medical literature, misogynist satire, sentimental novels, popular fiction, travel writing and pornography. Primary texts will be read alongside recent critical work by Thomas Lacquer, Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, which illuminate the ideological stakes writers played for when writing about the body. Topics for discussion will include disability and deformity, race, the sentimental body, dress and the body, the body as text and the relationship between the body and the body politic. The primary focus of this option will be literature, but we will also examine visual representations of the body in caricature and satire as well as in the portraiture.
Total contact hours: 32
Private study hours: 268
Total study hours: 300
Main assessment methods:
Essay 1 3,000 words 40%
Essay 2 3,000 words 40%
Seminar participation 20%
Reassessment methods:
100% coursework (4,500 words).
The University is committed to ensuring that core reading materials are in accessible electronic format in line with the Kent Inclusive Practices. The most up to date reading list for each module can be found on the university's reading list pages: https://kent.rl.talis.com/index.html
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
The intended subject specific learning outcomes.
On successful completion of this module students will be able to demonstrate the following subject specific learning outcomes:
1 read and respond to eighteenth century literature
2 consider the body is a cultural construct
3 read the set texts within their relevant historical, literary and cultural contexts
4 both apply and interrogate critical and theoretical strategies appropriate to the study of the body in the eighteenth century
5 discuss and write about visual culture and consider the relationship between print culture and the visual arts
The intended generic learning outcomes.
On successful completion of this module students will be able to demonstrate the following generic learning outcomes:
1 develop their abilities to analyse texts critically and make comparisons across a range of reading
2 develop their abilities to articulate coherent critical arguments using a variety of methodss
3 understand and interrogate various critical approaches and the theoretical assumptions that underpin these approaches
4 develop their abilities to carry out independent research
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