Observing and Recording the Eighteenth Century

• Upper Level

• Prerequisites: ENG 2100

Reading across various genres—novels, poetry, periodicals, broadsides, plays, diaries, travelogues—we will study what and how people recorded the world around them in the eighteenth century. We will track records across the century to study how writers explored issues of race, gender, colonialism, class, sexuality, and more.

We will explore Special Collections, and find texts that uniquely observe and record the reaches of eighteenth-century England's empire, and create digital editions to make these works freely available to researchers around the world for the first time.

The British Novel

• Upper Level

• Prerequisites: ENG 2100

Reading across various genres—novels, poetry, periodicals, broadsides, plays, diaries, travelogues—we will study what and how people recorded the world around them in the eighteenth century. We will track records across the century to study how writers explored issues of race, gender, colonialism, class, sexuality, and more.

We will explore Special Collections, and find texts that uniquely observe and record the reaches of eighteenth-century England's empire, and create digital editions to make these works freely available to researchers around the world for the first time.

• Upper Level

• Prerequisites: ENG 2100

What were the origins of the British novel as we now know it? This class will use Patricia Spacks' Novel Beginnings to read novels from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries connected to the British Isles. Students will explore the various experiments—both successful and unsuccessful—that contributed to the formation of the British novel.