EN330 The Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth-Century Literature: Course information for 2013-2014
Course Convenor: Christina Lupton
Overview:
This course, open to second and third year students, aims to give a broad introduction to
the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain. We will read a roughly equal
selection of plays, novels, diaries, poems, and letters organized into themes that capture
aspects of eighteenth-century life: food, travel, dress, sex, reading, and working. This is
a period when the novel as we know it first appears and when the audience for literature
and the availability of print expands enormously. One set of questions guiding the course
will therefore address literature’s relation to “real” life, a category we will investigate
itself as we read reports on everyday practices. How does the novel reflect or distort
experience? How does reading change the way people live? How is the fate of realism
connected to the possibility of making the lives and habits of normal individuals
appealing? Another focus of the course will be the way that commodity culture and the
movement of things and people defines eighteenth-century culture. How are new kinds
of materiality part of the Enlightenment? How do things—and books—begin to circulate
in new ways? In answering this question, we will be using archival and primary research
sources throughout the course and visiting eighteenth century objects in local collections.
Assessment
Students will choose between doing an essay (40%) and an exam (40%) or two essays
(each 40%).
All students will also choose one material object or practice from the period to investigate
over the course of the year and will present the results of their research as an oral
presentation in Term 3. These research assignments will be written up in the form of a
WIKI page (think “Wikipedia”) linked to the entries of other class members. Possible
stubs for these pages include: potatoes, wigs, cross-dressing, contraception, shoes, silk,
paper, air balloons, quills, apples, scrapbooks, cider, coffeeshops, etc. Research for this
page will involve reading original sources online (searching ECCO, EEBO and other
databases available through the library), taking note of the role one’s object or practice
plays in course texts, and finding or creating images associated with the object in
question. This WIKI page will be the basis of a final presentation and a grade (worth
20%) will be given for the page and presentation.
Texts for purchase
Eighteenth-Century Poetry: an Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine
Gerrard (Blackwell, 2004)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Malcolm Jack, intro. Anita
Desai (London: Virago, 1994)
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn
New (Penguin Classics, 2003)
Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford, 2008)
Boswell, London Journal 1762-63 (Penguin Classics, 2010)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford, 2008)
Austen, Emma, ed. Adela Pinch (Oxford, 2008)
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (Dover Thrift)
Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, ed Jon Mee (Oxford
2009)
Holcroft, Hugh Trevor (public domian book; free and available through Amazon)
Photocopy Packet including: Polly Honeycombe, “Adventures of a Black Coat,”
“Adventures of a Silk Petticoat”; “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”; Lowlife, Or One
half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Lives; extracts from Thomas Turner’s
Diary, Henry Fielding, The Female Husband, extracts from Fanny Hill; recipes.
Recommend Secondary Reading:
Sex:
Kathleen Lubey, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain 1660-1760
(Bucknell, 2012)
Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse During the
Long Eighteenth Century in England” Genders 6: Fall 1989.
Reading:
Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: a Dangerous Occupation
(Cambridge, 1999)
Isobel Rivers (Ed.), Books and Their Readers in 18th Century England, Vols 1&2
(Continuum 2001)
Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2006)
David Brewer (Ed.) “Introduction” Polly Honeycombe (Broadveiw, 2012)
Work:
E.P Thompson, “Time, “Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” Past and Present
38: Dec 1967
Mark Blackwell, “Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration” in Mark Blackwell, The Secret
Lives of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England
(Bucknell, 2009)
Dress:
Bonnie Blackwell, “Corkscrews and Courtesans: Sex and Death in Circulation Novels”
and Lamb, “The Rape of the Lock as Still Life” in Mark Blackwell, The Secret Lives of
Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Bucknell,
2009)
Julie Park, The Self and It (Stanford 2010)
Travel
David Porter, “Gendered Utopias” in David Porter, Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century
England (Cambridge, 2010).
Jonathan Lamb, “Making Babies in the South Seas” in Lamb, The Things Things Say
(Princeton, 2011)
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge,
1992)
Food
Sidney Mintz “The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption” and TH
Breen, “The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth
Century” in David Brewer and Roy Porter (Eds.), Consumption and The World of Goods
(Routledge 1993).
Rebecca Pang, The Invention of the Restaurant (Harvard, 2000)
In addition, students will be using the online databases Eighteenth-Century Collections
Online and 17th 18th Century Burney Collections Newspapers and Women’s History
Online to find and compare eighteenth-century texts on their chosen research topic. We
will watch a recorded modern production of She Stoops to Conquer.
Syllabus
Week 1: Introduction; choice of objects/practices
Sex
Week 2: Boswell, London Journal
Week 3: Richardson, Pamela
Week 4: Cleland, Fanny Hill (extracts in photocopy packet); Fielding, The Female
Husband (in photocopy packet)
Reading
Week 4: George Colman, Polly Honeycombe; Pope, “The Dunciad” (in anthology)
Week 5: Sterne, Tristram Shandy Chapters 1-3
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Chapters 4-9 and “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”
(in photocopy packet); Dixon, “From a Gilt Paper to Cloe” (in anthology)
Working
Week 7: “Lowlife, or, One Half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Lives” (in
photocopy packet); Philips, “The Splendid Shilling” (in anthology)
Week 8: Duck, “The Thresher’s Labor”; Collier, “The Woman’s Labor” Leapor,
“Crumble-Hall”; “Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”; Gray, “Elegy in a Country
Churchyard”; Burns, “To a Mouse” (all in anthology)
Week 9: Holcroft, Hugh Trevor, Vol 1 and 2
Week 10: Visit to material objects collection
Term 2
Travel
Week 1: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Week 2: Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters
Week 3: Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden Norway and Denmark
Dress
Week 4: Swift, “Stella’s Birthday, 1721”; “Stella’s Birthday, 1727”; The Lady’s Dressing
Room” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”; Pope, “Rape of the Lock” (all in
anthology
Week 5: “Adventures of a Silk Petticoat”; “Adventures of a Black Coat” (in packet)
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Food
Week 8: Thomas Turner diary extracts; recipes (in photocopy packet)
Week 9: Austen, Emma
Week 10: Recap and Cooking/Party
Term 3
Week 1: WIKI presentations and Revision Lecture
Week 2: WIKI presentations and Revision Lecture
Week 3: WIKI presentations