Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

01   CAC   MW4   12147   FESTA    MU-208 This course offers a survey of later eighteenth-century British literature, with special attention to the ways literature and art shaped forms of collective and individual identity in what is sometimes called the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Revolutions.  Focusing on the cultural and historical transformations that (re)shaped categories of gender, sexuality, social rank or class, nation, and race, the course will address the role played by literary form and...

01  CAC    MTH2       ZITIN         MU-301        This course introduces the literature of eighteenth-century Britain by zeroing in on one of its characteristic features: the literary debate. The main activity of the course will be the very close reading of paired poems that are in dialogue with one another. Sometimes these poems are competing adaptations of traditional subjects (for example, seduction poems or impotence poems); sometimes, authors pick fights with one another more directly, calling out an adversary or...

02    CAC    TTH6    12149     LUPTON     MU-208 Building a (Fictional) World in the Eighteenth Century When we think of world building today, we imagine the construction of fictional and fantasy worlds adjacent to our own – perhaps in fiction, perhaps in games or media environments.  In the 1700s, writers were just beginning to imagine what it might be to create a believable, lived-in fictional world that would mirror their own.  They were developing techniques of description, visualization, mapping, and...

01   CAC   MW5    12165     FESTA    AB-2250 Why are there so many soldiers stationed in the seemingly sleepy provincial towns where the novels of Jane Austen are so often set?  Jane Austen may conjure up images of a circumscribed world of country towns, flowing dresses and decorous manners, but she lived at a moment of immense historical turmoil, marked by famine, political repression, civil tumult at home, and slavery, revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars abroad.  This course will explore the novels of Jane...