English 772-001: Restoration and 18C Literature
Instr: Kalter, Barrett
Office: CRT 595, x4500
e-mail: bkalter@uwm.edu
Office hours: tba
Course Information: Thursday 6:30-9:10,CRT 466
Course Description
This course is a survey of English literature and culture from the Restoration of Charles II (1660) to the creation of the United Kingdom (1801). These years were defined by the waning authority of court culture, a market economy driven by consumer desire and sustained by colonial expansion, the overlapping of new types of voluntary association with traditional kinship hierarchies, and the influence of empirical science on notions of experience and being. We will investigate these and related transformations through readings in a wide range of genres, such as satiric poetry, the periodical essay, speculative history, travel narrative, moral philosophy, and the gothic novel. While using these works to reconstruct the shared beliefs and controversies characteristic of the long eighteenth century, we will also analyze the formal qualities of these different kinds of writing, and consider how authors used them to advance particular claims or produce specific effects and how in turn we may use them to develop our own arguments. This course will therefore serve as an introduction both to a historical period, and to the methods and theoretical concerns of historicist literary scholarship more generally.
Primary works include: poems by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Leapor, Mary Collier, James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray; nonfiction prose by John Locke, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Bernard Mandeville, Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft; John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey.
Discussion topics will include: pornography as medium of political expression; the naturalization of race; the public sphere, domesticity, and interiority; commodity fetishism; tourism, the picturesque, and rural labor; nationhood and the idea of progress; and the pleasures and perceived hazards of the novel as mass entertainment.
Written requirements: weekly position papers; an annotated bibliography and class presentation; two ten-page papers.
