9:30a-10:45a TR (30) 3 cr.
This course will cluster the readings around several social and
aesthetic issues of the
later eighteenth century. We will consider the splintering of older
forces of authority by
increasing market relations, the rise of a bourgeois morality, and the
growth of the nation
state and nationalism. We will connect these issues to formal
developments such as the rise
of the novel and the de-politicization and shift of voice in poetry,
and to debates around
reading, writing, and gender. We will read various writings by Samuel
Johnson and James
Boswell, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Eliza Heywood's The
Female Spectator
(selections), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, William
Hogarth's
Engravings and Joshua Reynold's Discourses (selections).
We will think about
how authors and texts participated in the struggle over the
reorganization of cultural
values. What values do they make and why?
Alternatively, we will examine the limits of these efforts. Texts by
turns bawdy, formally
experimental, gothic, or private all work against the moral, public,
national conventions of
the period. We shall read Henry Fielding's Shamela, Laurence
Sterne's Tristram
Shandy, poetry by Thomas Gray, William Collins, Robert Burns, and
Anne Radcliffe's
The Italian to examine how and why.
Course requirements will include active participation, informal
response papers, one short
group research presentation, two formal papers, and an essay
final.