Observing and Recording the Eighteenth Century
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Upper Level
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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
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Upper Level
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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.
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Upper Level
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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.
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Lower Level
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Prerequisite(s):WRT 1060 (or equivalent) with a grade of C or higher and English major or minor standing
An introduction to literary studies, close reading, literary devices, research practices, and writing for English majors and minors.
In this course we will read samples from each major literary genre: prose fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Students will master close reading and literary explication skills, take weekly reading comprehension quizzes, complete short close-reading papers, and one long research paper.
We will use a “slow learning” method, spending more time on fewer texts to fully flex our skills at reading them thoroughly. Authors we will explore include William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn, and more.