Romance, Revolutions, and the Birth of the Novel

Catalog description

This course focuses on the "long 18th century" in Great Britain, covering the era of the Enlightenment as well as Romanticism. This was a tumultuous time in British history, marked by numerous political and social revolutions as well as notable literary creativity. In this course, students will study developments in English literature such as the novel, the essay, satire, journalism, popular theater, and poetry. Themes of the course will vary, but may include civil liberty, sexuality and gender, colonialism and abolition, the city and the country, industrialization, and the French Revolution. Authors studied may include Congreve, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron.