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 genre in the elaboration of different modes of identity and readerly identification, on the one hand, and in the emergence of concepts of political subjectivity and rights, on the other. We will range widely across media, including novels, plays, poems, paintings, political prints, conduct books, diaries, journalism, and advertisements. Authors may include Boswell, Burney, Sterne, Sheridan, Equiano, Cowper, Edgeworth, Wollstonecraft, and Austen; artists may include Hogarth, Wright of Derby, Gainsborough, and Gillray.