Civil War, Restoration, Revolution

This course gives students a broad introduction to the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, covering a period from the English Civil War of the 1640s to the French Revolution of 1789. Primary texts may be works of poetry, prose, or drama, and are studied in relation to their historical and cultural contexts. Topics covered may include the following: literature of the English Civil War; Milton's Paradise Lost; Restoration drama; the flowering of satire; literature of the Enlightenment; English landscape writing; Neoclassicism and its emphasis on reason, harmony, and wit; the birth of the modern novel; the literature of sentiment and sensibility; the origins and development of the Gothic; the emergence of the Industrial Revolution.