EN636: Eighteenth Century Literature, 1750-1830 
This module explores the richness and diversity of the literature and culture of the later eighteenth century. Students will be introduced to texts from a wide range of genres including travel writing, the novel (still a new and experimental literary form in this period), anti-slavery texts, pastoral and georgic poetry, the gothic, and the political novels of the 1790s.
The course begins with Samuel Johnson’s influential History of Rasselas, an oriental tale and moral fable, which attempted to map out new directions for the novel. In the following weeks, we will explore a number of other experiments with fictional form, including the sentimental (or domestic) novel and the oriental tale, and will reflect on how these different modes of writing serve to uphold, challenge, or satirise culturally constructed notions of gender, race and class. In the second half of term, we delve more deeply into the questions surrounding nation and empire, otherness and hybridity we first encountered in Rasselas in our reading of various accounts of Cook’s Voyages to the Pacific and Olaudah Equiano’s abolitionist autobiography, An Interesting Narrative. In the final weeks our attention turns to the 1790s and the radical fictions produced by supporters of the French Revolution such as Mary Wollstonecraft. This course will, among other things, provide students with an opportunity to consider questions of gender, race, nature, sexuality, custom and education – questions that preoccupied eighteenth-century culture as much as they preoccupy our own.
