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While Robert Burns was canonized as Scotland’s national poet, Robert Fergusson, who was much admired by Burns, has become a much more obscure figure. This course is about both poets, but it is also about the cultural context of their works, i.e. about eighteenth-century Scottish culture in general and eighteenth-century Edinburgh in particular. Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was a fascinating place. It was home to the famous philosophers, authors and scientists of the Scottish enlightenment, and with its beautifully neo-classical New Town, it re-invented itself as the Athens of the North. At the same time, its dark side was much in evidence; there was the Old Town, which was full of dangers both for the living and the dead, as body-snatchers routinely stole newly interred corpses which were then sold to members of the medical profession.
In this seminar, you will get a chance to work not only on texts, but also on images and music of the period. A reader will be made available at the usual shop (Reckhammerweg 4) from early March. If you want to do this seminar, you should have bought the reader and prepared at least the first 50 pages before the first week of the new semester – so think, annotate, look things up if necessary and, above all, enjoy!
Formal requirements: regular attendance, reading and preparing the assigned texts, active participation, Hausarbeit. |
