This module is designed to draw together and combine the current first year Restoration and Augustan Literature module and the second year elective module Sensibility and Romanticism to offer a broader and more inclusive survey of British and Irish Literature between 1660 and 1830. This innovation is intended to offer students a more comprehensive 'long' eighteenth-century option in second year in the proposed new BA.

The aim of this course is to provide students with a survey of literature in English between the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 through to the democratic reforms of 1830. This course aims to immerse students in the literary language of the time across several genres. We will first look at contexts for the emergence of modern genres such as the polemical pamphlet, the novel, and the journalistic essay. In this first part of the course is studied the prose and poetic writings of figures such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith. In its second half this module provides students with a survey of literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period in which literature was involved with, and inspired by, revolutionary political activity. The writers of this period grappled with issues of race, slavery, gender, democracy, and republicanism. We will trace a shift from a negative and trivialising concept of 'the romantic' towards the more complex Romantic cults of Nature and Imagination, thought through in the context of intense friendships and collaboration between clusters of poets and critics. We will survey the writings Robert Burns, Williams Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, among others.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to speak and write with a critical and cogent awareness of • the historical, intellectual, literary, and cultural significance of terms such as 'Restoration', 'Augustan', 'Enlightenment', 'Sensibility' and 'Romanticism'; • Literary genre and generic trends in the period 1660-1830; • the nature of Restoration and Augustan literary cliques and controversies; of literary friendships and controversies • literary debates between 1660 and 1830 about liberty, slavery, and the rights of men and women; • Methodological and scholarly debates in late 17th, 18th and early 19th literary studies

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: Demonstrate a greater knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and culture; Relate Enlightenment and Romantic concepts and debates about citizenship, rights, creativity, and expression to contemporary concerns and cultural activity; Demonstrate in writing and in oral presentations a critical appreciation of the aesthetic, ethical, political, and national questions raised in literary history and critical debates thereupon.

n/a

This module is taught by a combination of lectures -- which situate late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century British and Irish literatures in their historical and generic contexts -- and tutorials which will facilitate close readings of individual texts and discursive exchanges on issues of theme, form, and critical reception. Together, these lectures and tutorials will equip students with a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the enlightenment's creative and artistic heritage, and the period's emphases on creative collaboration and proactive citizenship. The module will be examined by essay and presentation work which will enhance and asses students' literary, critical, and historical vocabulary.