ENG307H1

Eighteenth-Century Literature

This course explores the literatures produced between the heyday of English neoclassicism in the early part of the eighteenth century and the eruption of Romanticism towards the century’s end. The period between those two moments was marked by a refinement of Georgian taste, by the controversies and advances of Enlightenment, by the flamboyant performance of sentimentality, and ultimately, by a protracted series of global conflicts and revolutions. This course traces these themes and others alongside a careful study of the formal innovations of the period, its shifting rhetorics, and central aesthetic debates. Authors studied may include Pope, Swift, Gray, Johnson, Sterne, Equiano, Barbauld, Cowper, Wollstonecraft, and Blake.