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Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

The decades spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries encompassed a turbulent and transformational period for English literature. Although it began with the “restoration” of the English monarchy after the fall of the commonwealth, this period saw one successful “glorious” revolution and two civil Jacobite conflicts. At the same time, the publishing industry in Britain emerged as a major economic force and, for the first time, a wide range of authors had unprecedented access to a well-read and literate audience. The literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, therefore, explored issues of political change, literary tradition and the role of the public in British society in new and exciting ways. In this course we will explore the writing of this period, from the work of Dryden in the late seventeenth-century, to the satirical work of Swift and Pope. Along the way we will examine how authors responded to the changing political and literary landscape through the utopian and dystopian works of Mary Cavendish’s Blazing World and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the rise of Restoration drama with the comedy of William Congreve’s Way of the World and the tragedy of Joseph Addison’s Cato, and the satirical mock-epics of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock. We will also explore the changing genres of the period with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and investigate the early development of the novel with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.