BA English Literature / Course details

In this course, we will explore how Restoration and early eighteenth-century British writers and artists represented the body, paying particular attention to issues including gender, sexuality, politics, economics, and health.   We’ll consider different kinds of bodies—male and female, healthy and diseased, black and white, old and young, human and animal—as well as different bodily processes, from orgasm and excretion to illness, ageing, and death.  We’ll also explore the various metaphors used to conceptualize the body and its uses (or abuses). Was the body a gift from God?  A commodity to be bought and sold via practices like prostitution or slavery?  A machine? A network of vibrating nerves? Looking at a range of materials produced between 1660 and 1760 (including engravings, poems, novels, plays, and opera), we will consider how and why so many writers and artists in Restoration and early eighteenth-century Britain sought to reconceptualize the body and its place in the wider world. 

- to analyse different theories of the body’s functions and processes and how they relate to imaginative portrayals of the body between 1660 and 1760  

- to discuss different metaphors used to conceptualize the body and bodily processes in Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature and art  

- to consider issues like gender and sexuality, race, aging, and disease insofar as they affect representations of the body  

- to interpret works in a variety of genres and media, including cartoons, caricatures, popular engravings, poetry, novels, and non-fiction prose  

- to engage with selected critical writings on eighteenth-century texts.  

- to develop skills of critical thought, speech, and writing. 

Week 1: Introduction and libertine poetry

Week 2: Poetry by John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester

Week 3: William Wycherley, The Country Wife

Week 4: Susanna Centlivre, The Busy Body

Week 5: Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Week 6: John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera

Week 7: poetry by Jonathan Swift

Week 8: Alexander Pope, Epistle to Arbuthnot

Week 9: Engravings by William Hogarth

Week 10: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy  

Week 11: Conclusions 

This course will have a 1 hour lecture and a 2 hour discussion-based seminar per week. Seminar activities will vary, but will include online annotation exercises, public speaking exercises, and debates, as well as smaller group discussions.  There will also be a fieldtrip to visit the Hogarth collections at Chetham’s Library.

Bibliographies, lecture slides, and study questions for each week will be posted on Blackboard.  Seminar participants may also use Blackboard communications (email, message boards, etc) to coordinate presentation content.  

- demonstrate familiarity with Restoration and early eighteenth-century works in a range of different genres and media  

- discuss how ideas about sex, disease, and the body developed in the long  eighteenth century  

- discuss how theories about sex, disease, and the body influenced, and were  influenced by, imaginative representations in literature and art

- discuss how different bodies (the body politic, the body natural, the king’s body,             the female body, the bodies of animals vs. humans), body parts, and bodily  processes were conceptualized and represented in the Restoration and early eighteenth-century  

- identify and explicate some of the changes in formal literary and artistic practice  that occurred over the course of the long eighteenth century

- situate works by several Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers and/or artists within their historical and cultural contexts
 

- use textual evidence to generate arguments about course texts

- summarize and engage with the arguments presented in secondary reading

- write and speak articulately about course texts and/or themes

- introduce and explain ideas in discussion and seminar exercises/activities

- engage in courteous and constructive discussion and/or debate with other seminar participants 

- write and speak articulately about course texts and themes

- introduce and explain ideas in smaller and larger group discussion

- engage in courteous and constructive discussion and/or debate with other seminar participants

- articulate ideas in seminar exercises/activities 

You may wish to borrow or purchase the following texts to read in advance:

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (You must buy the Penguin edition)*  

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (Oxford University Press edition)

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, volumes 1 and 2 (Penguin edition)  

A list of optional preliminary secondary reading is available via the library’s Reading Lists site.