Spring 2007 Courses

ENGL 320-01: The Age of the Scandalous History: Rakes, Radicals, and the Circulation of 18th Century Literature (Hurley)

T/TH 1:00-2:30pm, Old Main 009

The title of this course has been altered slightly (from "The Age of Satire") to reflect our concern, in this class, with the ways literature represents and circulates sexual scandal during the period known as the long eighteenth-century. Some of the texts we read will indeed be satirical. Some will be sentimental. Others will be generically perverse by any modern standard. Of central concern will be the ways literature grapples with, transforms, and is, at once, transformed by, the politics of sexuality and the sexuality of politics during this time.

We will begin by examining the form and politics of libertine literature and drama that attended the restoration of Charles II. We will end with a consideration of how and why the libertine crosses the ocean a century later and gains new life and significance in the America—precisely when the figure seems to have been exhausted in Britain. Along the way, we will consider the role of sexual scandal in the development of the novel, in political philosophy and critique, in the emergence of pornography as a distinct genre, and, yes, in the fine (and often bawdy) art of satire.

Primary texts will include the following:

• Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister Ed. Janet Todd (Penguin Classics) NOTE: This text is apparently out of print. Students should make every attempt to get a copy of this book through second-hand booksellers.
• Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson
• Cleland, John Fanny Hill; Or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Penguin Classics)
• Samuel Richardson Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded
• Restoration and Eighteenth Century Comedy.
• Aubrey Beardsley and Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock (Dover Illustrated Ed.)
• The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, The Earl of Rochester
• Hannah Foster Webster The Coquette
• Charles Brockden Brown Arthur Mervyn

Additional shorter works and critical articles will also be available on reserve.

NOTE TO SENIORS WHO STILL NEED A PRE-1900 AMERICAN LIT REQUIREMENT: If you need this class to qualify for that requirement, please contact me immediately.

Spring 2007 Course Listings