CC-3: British Literature (fiction and non-fiction): 18th Century

Credits 06

CC3T: British Literature (fiction and non-fiction): 18th Century

Course Contents:

Play:  

• William Congreve: The Way of the World

Prose:  

• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (Books III and IV)
•  Addison and Steele: ‘Sir Roger at Church’
• Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics

• The Enlightenment and Neoclassicism
• Restoration Comedy
•  The Country and the City
• The Novel and the Periodical Press

Suggested Readings:

• Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage [Text and discussion] (London: Routledge, 1996).
• Daniel Defoe, ‘The Complete English Tradesman’ (Letter XXII), ‘The Great Law of Subordination Considered’ (Letter IV), and ‘The Complete English Gentleman’, in Literature and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Stephen Copley (London: Croom Helm, 1984). [Discussion]
• Samuel Johnson, ‘Essay 156’, in The Rambler, in Selected Writings: Samuel Johnson, ed. Peter Martin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009) pp.194–7; Rasselas Chapter 10; ‘Pope’s Intellectual Character: Pope and Dryden Compared’, from The Life of Pope, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 8th edn (New York: Norton, 2006) pp. 2693–4, 2774–7.

CC-4: British Romantic Literature (1798-1832)

Credits 06

CC4T: British Romantic Literature (1798-1832)

Course Contents:

Poetry:

• William Blake: ‘The Lamb’, ‘The Tyger’
• William Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Christabel’ Part-1
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Ozymandias’
• John Keats: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Novel:

• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
•  Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations

Topics

• Reason and Imagination
• Conceptions of Nature
• Literature and Revolution
• The Gothic
• The Romantic Lyric

Suggested Readings:

• William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, in Romantic Prose and Poetry, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York: OUP, 1973) pp. 594–611.
• John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817’, and ‘Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October, 1818’, in Romantic Prose and Poetry, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York: OUP, 1973) pp. 766–68, 777–8.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Preface’ to Emile or Education, tr. Allan Bloom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Everyman, 1993) chap. XIII, pp. 161–66.