Session | Session Focus | Reading Assignment | Other Assignment | Meeting Place/Exam Dates |
week 1 | Introduction to the Course and Requirements
Civil War and its fall-out -- viewing from Simon Schama's History of Britain series
| Background reading: Broadview Introduction to The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
Margaret Cavendish Poetry selections, Selection from The Description of a New World, call the Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure pp. 3-31.
Samuel Pepys's Diary selections about the Great Fire of London pp. 112-23.
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week 2 | Christian Allegory: Pilgrim's Progress From This World to That Which Is To Come
The Popish Plot and the meaning of the Biblical references in “Absalom and Achitophel”; Aphra Behn Orinooco | John Bunyan selection from The Pilgrim’s Progress | | |
week 3 | Robinson Crusoe;: Capitalism, Imperialism and the Rise of the Novel | Daniel Defoe Selections from Robinson Crusoe | | |
week 4 | Rakes and Sluts? Women's sexual and litearary reputation. Eliza Haywood's Fantomina | E.Haywood, "Fantomina."
Aphra Behn, "Disappointment." | First Home Paper due | |
week 5 | Satire and social mores. Hogarth's modern moral subjects. | Selections from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Mary Astell's "A Serious Proposal to the Ladies" and "Reflections Upon Marriage"; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu "The Reasons that Induced Dr. S to Write a Poem Called the Lady's Dressing Room"; Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room,""Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband," and "The Spectator No. 573". | | |
week 6 | Political references in Gulliver's Travels. Who was Walpole and how did he change English government?
Slavery and the Anti-Slavery Movement in Britain Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano(Restoration Anthology)
Mary Prince The History of Mary Prince A West Indian Slave Related by Herself(Romantics Anthology)
| Jonathan Swift Selection from Gulliver's Travels
“Colonization and Slavery” on the Website and Contexts: The Abolition of Slavery in the next Anthology Age of Romanticism
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week 7 | Alexander Pope "The Rape of the Lock"
Seminar: Pope’s social circle and his complicated background. The real-life story behind the poem.
Horace Wolpole: The Castle of Otranto | Extracts from "The Castle of Otranto" | MIDTERM EXAM | |
Week 8 | Land Enclosures and what was their social impact on the changing social landscape of 18th century Britain?
Labouring class poets Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands | Robert Burns "To a Mouse," "A Man's a Man for A' That," "Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn," A Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne"
Cowper from The Task Book 1: The Sofa
Oliver Goldsmith "The Deserted Village"
Thomas Gray "Elegy on a Country Churchyard"
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week 9 | William Blake "Songs of Innocence and Experience"
Background Reading: French Revolution and Napoleonic Era (Website)
View excerpt from Simon Schama's History of Britain series: Forces of Nature
| Selected poems from Song of Innocence and Experience
Read selections from Anna Laetitia Barbauld "The Rights of Women", "Washing Day," "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem"; Charlotte Smith "Beachy Head"; Mary Wollstonecraft "Maria or the Wrongs of Women"; Felicia Hemans "The Homes of England," "Women and Fame"; Mary Robinson "A Letter to the Women of England," "The Negro Girl"; Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) "Love's Last Lesson". | | |
week 10 | Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine during the French Revolution -- ideas on the Rights of Man and the Rights of Women
| Background reading: Women and Society p. 100ff
Mary Wollstonecraft Read selections in the anthology | | |
week 11 | Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads and the spirit of romanticism | Coileridge: Ri2me of the Ancient Mariner"; "Frost at Midnight."
Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey"; "Michael"; "I wandered lonely as a cloud";
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"; "My heart leaps up"
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week 12 | John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the spirit of the age
The Peterloo Massacre and what it meant in terms of shifting political and class relations | Read Selections from John Keats: "La Belle Dame San Merci," "Eve of St. Agnes," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn," "Ode on Melancholy"
Percy Bysshe Shelley "Mask of Anarchy" "Adonais"
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Week 13 | | | | |
week 14 | Lord Byron and other romantics - passion, war, and excess: deflating romantic pretensions
Mary Shelley's response to male creativity: Frankenstein | Lord Byron: selecitons from "Don Juan"
Mary Shelley: "Frankenstein." | | |
week 14 | Mary Shelley: "Frankenstein" | | | |
week 15 | Final Research Paper due | | | |