English 119

Other Readings and Media

See below.

Description

In an age of commercial print expansion, men and women writers negotiated the possibilities, limits, and perceived dangers of publishing. In this class, we will explore the forms and strategies writers deployed in those negotiations, whether women poets, romance writers, and playwrights navigating the scandalous publicity of publishing their work; philosophers, periodical writers, and fiction writers aiming to popularize new scientific discoveries, political theories, and approaches to life in a globalizing market society; or satirists skeptical of a new commercial regime and its proliferation of print. As we interpret late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century depictions of coffee house conversationalists, hack writers, masquerading women, naïve travellers, criminal gangs, among others, we shall be especially interested in the development of new techniques of realist writing and the complexities of the satire of this period.   

Provisional Reading: Poetry of John Dryden, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift; Prose of John Locke, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding; Plays of William Wycherley and John Gay.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.