This course in particular will trace the intersections between Enlightenment thought and the development of literary culture from the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the close of the eighteenth century. At the heart of the Enlightenment project was a fundamental belief that reason, self-critique and empirical observation were the true foundations of knowledge, rather than religion, authority or dogma. Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).ĮNGL 303 Restoration and Eighteenth-century Literature 2ĭescription: The focus of this course will be the Enlightenment, a philosophical and intellectual movement that emerged in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Michael Alpert, ed., Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin).The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Hackett).Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (Oxford).Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford).(The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2016.) Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 51). Our work together will aim at a critical analysis of the textual ideologies articulated in this experimental process of historical combination. We will consider the novel as responding to a network of interrelated problems – of the self and its imaginative politics – at the representational crossroads of medieval epic, courtly romance, spiritual autobiography, picaresque satire, colonialist adventure, gallant intrigue, baroque casuistry, bourgeois conduct book, sentimental love story, moral treatise, psychological realism, and mock-heroic “comic epic in prose.” As the emerging literary “form of forms,” the early modern novel vibrantly juxtaposes and interweaves all these different generic strands.
Our readings and discussion will refer to the European context of the evolution of this narrative form in England. Description: This course will canvas some of the “origins” of the English novel and trace its development (particularly as anti-romance satire and realism) up to the mid-eighteenth century.
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