English 45B

Other Readings and Media

Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Pope, A.: Essay on Man and Other Poems; Franklin, B.: The Autobiography; Equiano, O.: The Interesting Narrative of the Life;  Austen, J.: Persuasion; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Wordsworth, W.: Selected Poems; Melville, H.: Benito Cereno

Description

This course is an introduction to British and America literature from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.  We will trace how literary forms and genres adapt across the period to new kinds of knowledge and understanding, while considering the changing place of literature in the private, social, and political lives of its readers.  We will especially consider the response of  literature to an age of revolution and to a transatlantic culture that staged encounters between rational thinking and sentimental experience, between neoclassical models and romantic sensibilities, and between the language of independence and the respect for history.  Authors include Defoe, Pope, Franklin, Johnson, Equiano, Jefferson, Austen, M. Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Poe, Melville, and Whitman