EN635: Eighteenth Century Literature 1660-1750
This module explores the changing face of the literary landscape during the first half of ‘the long eighteenth century’. The growth and commercialisation of the literary marketplace in this period led to a dramatic expansion in and democratisation of print culture, with wider reading communities (including more women and the labouring classes) enjoying increased access to fiction, travel writing, journalism, memoir, and biography. This module reflects on the implications of these developments both for eighteenth-century culture and for the future of textual production.
The course begins with two themed weeks on satirical and celebratory accounts of the country and the city, in the process delving into questions about identity formation and the forces that shaped subjectivity in a changing world, including coffee houses, periodicals, and poetry. In the following weeks we move from metropole to colonial periphery, with weeks on Aphra Behn’s enduring and influential Oroonoko, a novella that brought home to British readers the slave economy upon which their nation was critically dependent, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a brilliant and fantastic reflection upon nationhood, otherness, and difference. In the second half of the term we take an extended look at the evolution of the novel – a new, unstable, and innovative prose form in this period – tracing its origins in the scandalous amatory fictions produced by women writers before investigating Daniel Defoe’s novelised criminal biography Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson’s groundbreaking Pamela, and John Cleland’s infamously pornographic Fanny Hill. We conclude with a week on travel writing, considering the question of Orientalism and how a number of the narrative strategies we have observed in the course inflect Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters, which document her travels to the Ottoman empire.
Further information Seminar Reading List and Bibliography