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This seminar will give you an opportunity to explore what it was like to live and write as a woman in eighteenth-century Britain. We will look into strategies allowing female poets to overcome all sorts of obstacles that did not exist for men. You will get to know privileged women from aristocratic families such as Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, who wrote about dark moods and melancholy, and Anne Ingram Viscountess Irvine, who wrote a poem that was in effect a brilliant full frontal attack on Alexander Pope, the most successful male poet of the time. At the other end of the social spectrum, there is Mary Leapor, a kitchen maid, who managed to self-educate herself and who wrote remarkable proto-feminist poems. Then there is Isabel Pagan, a Scottish woman who had to dictate her poems because she was illiterate. We shall also look beyond the British Isles and read poems by Phyllis Wheatley, an enslaved woman originally from West Africa who became the first Afro-American poet.
The material to be worked on will be made available in a Moodle room.
Requirements: preparation for each session, active participation, and, if applicable, written work/exam according to your particular Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary.
Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements. |
