BA English Literature and American Studies

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· explore a range of canonical and noncanonical poems written by women in Britain and America across the long eighteenth century;

· use these texts to introduce students to eighteenth-century poetry – its history and development, its critical reception today (including legacies of feminist recovery), and some of its principal preoccupations across forms and genres;

· examine this poetry’s renewed importance for the intersecting research fields of gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism

· build on critical skills and vocabularies developed in such courses as Theory and Text; Literature and History; Gender, Sexuality and the Body: Theories and Histories; Romanticism (1776-1832); and Satire and the Novel: English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century.

1 x 1hour Lecture and 1 x 2 hour seminar

-Confidently engage with work in eighteenth-century poetry, from feminist recoveries of poems by women to the enduring significance of these texts for research in gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism 
-Demonstrate understanding of cultural contexts for eighteenth-century poetry, including debates about gender and sexuality, the body and its aesthetic representation, class and race, objects and animals, and the construction of the canon 
-Display aptitude for writing critically about poems from a range of theoretically informed perspectives

-Analyse how encounters with the nonhuman in eighteenth-century women’s poetry generate opportunities to think beyond the limits of the human and its normative categories 
-Discuss how this project of revising existing orders of knowledge and representation can be read in new ways through queer, gender, and critical race, and environmental studies  
-Demonstrate proficiency with critical and theoretical vocabularies from studies in poetics, gender and sexuality, race, and environmental humanities

-Sustain a sophisticated scholarly argument focusing on how and why poetry is especially adept at facilitating these explorations, engaging with current ideas about form / formalism 
-Sharpen skills in close reading 
-Independently develop concepts and critical practices in an assessed portfolio of close readings of poems and an essay, informed by critical theory from the course

-Close reading and textual analysis
-Argumentation and criticality: the construction of clear, rigorous, and detailed critical writing
-Interpersonal and presentation skills in posing and defending perspectives to a group

Indicative primary reading: poetry by Anne Finch, Jane Holt, Elizabeth Thomas, Mary Leapor, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and others.

Selected Course Preparatory Reading: 
· Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez (eds), ‘Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social’, ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017) 
· Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins, 2005) 
· Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne (eds), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 
· Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano (eds), ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ special issue, GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015) 
· Jeremy Chow (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell, 2022) 
· Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (NYU, 2022) 
· Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Pennsylvania, 2019) 
· Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke, 2020) 
· Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU, 2020) 
· Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 2016) 
· Lisa L. Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minnesota, 2011) 
· Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke, 2014)