The eighteenth century was a particularly interesting and exciting period in the history of English literature. This was when the modern world – i.e. our world – began to take shape. This was when many phenomena such as the journalism as we know it and the novel came into being and immediately found a mass readership. Due to special historical, cultural and social conditions, English literature could develop in ways that would have been unthinkable on the continent.
This lecture course covers a wide range of texts and topics such as the rise of the novel (and its various shapes and forms: epistolary, erotic, experimental, Gothic etc.), other prose texts (travel literature, diaries and autobiographies such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s description of her experiences in Turkey, James Boswell’s outrageously honest diaries and the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave), poetry (for instance Alexander Pope’s elegant and polished pieces on topics such stupid books by stupid people and poems by female authors addressing the issue of gender roles and the position of women in society) and drama (including musical drama).
English literature is more than Literature produced in England; this is why particular attention will be paid to important authors from Scotland and their texts – you will get acquainted with, for instance, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns who both highlighted the Scottishness of their texts by using elements of Scots rather than standard English. We shall also consider the very close links between literature and the visual arts as well as literature and music. This means that there will also be lots to see and quite a bit to hear in this introduction to eighteenth-century English literature.
All texts to be discussed in this lecture course are available in ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). You should familiarize yourselves with this digital resource before the beginning of the semester. |
