Civil War, Restoration, Revolution

The long eighteenth century — roughly 1640 to 1789 — was when English literature wrestled directly with regicide, revolution, empire, and the slow invention of the modern self, and this course treats those texts as arguments about how language and political change feed each other. You'll read across Milton, Rochester, Sterne, and the satirists, building close readings that connect formal choices to the period's upheavals, with assessment riding on a paper proposal at midterm and a take-home term paper at the end. It sits between the earlier survey of medieval and Renaissance literature and the Romantics course that follows, so it's where you learn the critical vocabulary — wit, sensibility, neoclassicism, the rise of the novel — that the rest of the ELIT sequence assumes you already have.