Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
The long eighteenth century (1660–1837) was an era of revolutions, arguably the period during which revolutions in the modern sense first arrived in Britain and Western Europe. This class will examine literary responses to revolution, beginning with Edmund Burke’s crucial work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) and tracing connections back and forth across the “century,” looking at how conceptions of revolution develop, how literary works reflect such events, and how they perform, in their own right, revolutionary acts. We will read poetry, including parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost, works by Margaret Cavendish, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Gray; drama, including Aphra Behn’s The Rover and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera; novels, including Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian; as well as non-fiction prose by Mary Wollestonecraft, Thomas Paine, Oloudah Equiano, and others.
