01   TTH7  CAC  70710  ZUTSHI  SC-216

This course will focus on literary and cultural issues in British literature from around 1740 to 1800. Readings will range widely across genres — from poetry and the novel to non-fiction prose like letters, journals and essays, as well as visual and performative modes like painting and drama. Our readings will include novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne; poetry by Thomas Gray, William Collins, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More; a play by Richard Sheridan, short essays by Samuel Johnson and David Hume, political writings by Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, and engravings by William Hogarth. Topics to be discussed, both thematic and generic, include secularization, the construction of gender identities, slavery, revolution, theories of poetic imagination, the rise of the novel, and theories of satire and sentiment.