Postgraduate Course: Enlightenment and Romanticism 1688 - 1815 (ENLI11140)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to the new conceptions of social formation developed in the literature of this period, and in particular the literary response to the modern discourses of contractarian liberalism and political economy. It examines the genres which emerge to negotiate this relationship, including the novel and 'romantic' modes of verse. In particular, it concentrates on the impact of a "Scottish philosophy" (Hume, Smith, Ferguson) on the wider British literary field, and asks to what extent "modern" conceptions of British society are a product of Scottish responses to the Union of 1707. And it asks students to consider the ways in which these "modern" conceptualisations of the social whole have been adapted, adopted and challenged by those twentieth-century thinkers who underpin contemporary literary-critical practice. |
| Course description |
1. Introduction
2. The Liberal Subject
John Locke, 'Second Treatise' from "Two Treatises of Government" (1690);
Daniel Defoe, 'Robinson Crusoe' (1719);
Adorno and Horkheimer, 'The Concept of Enlightenment' from "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1944).
3. The Fate of Virtue in an Age of Commerce
Trenchard and Gordon, extracts from "Cato's Letters" (1720¿23);
Jonathan Swift, 'A Modest Proposal' (1729);
Alexander Pope, 'Epistle to Allen Lord Bathurst' (1733); 'The Dunciad' (1742 version);
Adam Ferguson, extracts from 'An Essay on the History of Civil Society' (1767);
Jürgen Habermas, extracts from 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere' (1962).
4. Gender and Modernity
Addison and Steele, extracts from 'The Spectator' (1711-12, 1714);
Samuel Richardson, 'Pamela' (1740);
Michel Foucault, extracts from 'A History of Sexuality volume 1: An Introduction' (1976).
5. Pastoral, Georgic, and National Myth
Alexander Pope, 'Windsor Forest' (1713);
Allan Ramsay, 'The Gentle Shepherd' (1725);
James Thomson, extracts from 'Spring' (1726) and 'Alfred' (1740);
Thomas Gray, "Elegy [...]" (1751), "The Bard" and "The Progress of Poesy" (1756);
James Macpherson, extracts from 'Fragments of Ancient Poetry';
Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity" in 'Language, Counter-Memory, Practice' (1980).
6. Political Economies
Tobias Smollett, 'Humphry Clinker' (1771);
Adam Smith, extracts from 'On the Nature and Origin of the Wealth of Nations' (1776).
7. Poetry and the Return of Politics at the end of the Eighteenth Century
Anna Barbauld, selected poems;
Robert Burns, selected poems;
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poems from 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798);
8. The Romantic Subject
Edmund Burke, extracts from 'A Philosophical Enquiry into [...] the Sublime and Beautiful' (1757);
William Wordsworth, extracts from 'The Prelude' (1805 version);
Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto I (1812);
Karl Marx, 'The German Ideology' part I (1845).
9. Burke and National Culture
Edmund Burke, 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790);
Maria Edgeworth, 'Castle Rackrent' (1800);
Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), 'The Wild Irish Girl' (1806);
T.S. Eliot, 'Notes Towards the Definition of Culture' (1948).
10. Gender and the Nation
Mary Wollstonecraft, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1791);
Jane Austen, 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813);
Judith Butler, 'Gender Trouble' (1990).
Aims and Objectives:
- to attempt to understand textual production in relation to social formations and their conceptualisation (i.e., in what ways do 'literary' genres such as (for example) the tragic drama, the novel or lyric verse provide specific resources for imagining the social whole?).
- to place writing from or about Scotland and/or Ireland at the centre of the curriculum and explore immediately pressing questions about political identity in the context of dramatically changing political relations within and between England, Scotland and Ireland (for example, the conception of society presented in the work of Scottish philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith can be read as a response to the stateless condition of Scotland after the Union with England in 1707).
- to consider how discourses of gender shape understanding of national differences in enlightenment culture.
- to evaluate how modern theories of nationalism address (or fail to address) enlightenment conceptualisations of the nation.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
4000 Word Essay (100%) |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- an understanding of how literary and cultural works document the complex and changing relationship between England, Ireland and Scotland from the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 to the end of the French wars in 1815.
- an understanding of how debates concerning the nation also explored a range of ideas concerning the adequacy of social and gender hierarchies.
- An understanding of the variety of enlightenment modes and genres in which ideas of the national and national difference were articulated.
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Reading List
- Canuel, Mark. "Holy Hypocrisy" and the Government of Belief: Religion and Nationalism in the Gothic. Studies in Romanticism 34.4 (Winter 1995): 507-30.
- Christie, John. "Adam Smith's Metaphysics of Language." In The Figural and the Literal, ed. Andrew Benjamin et al. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987
- Clark, J.C.D. Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism. Cambridge: CUP, 1994
- Cohen, Michele. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1996.
- Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992
- Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985
- Copley, Stephen, and Kathryn Sutherland (eds.). Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.
- Court, Franklin. Institutionalizing English Literature: The Cultural Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992
- Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
- Cunningham, Hugh. "The Language of Patriotism." In Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. Ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989), vol. I, pp.57-89
- Duncan, Ian. "Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and the Institutions of English." in Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Gerrard, Christine. The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000
- Janowitz, Ann. England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1990.
- Klinger, Samuel. The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1952.
- Kramnick, Jonathan. Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural past, 1700-1770. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
- Miles, Robert. "Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic." In Fred Botting (ed. and preface), The Gothic. Cambridge: Brewer, 2001. 47-70.
- ---. "Europhobia: the Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin." In Avril Horner (ed. and introd.), European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Manchester: MUP, 2002. 84-103
- Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740-1830. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
- Pittock, Murray. Inventing and Resisting Britain. London: Macmillan, 1997.
- Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
- ---. Barbarism and Religion. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. Vol. II, Narratives of Civil Government.
- Potkay, Adam. The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
- Phillipson, Nicholas. "Adam Smith as Civic Moralist¿, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179-202.
- Radcliffe, David Hill. "Ossian and the Genres of Culture." Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992): 231-32.
- Ross, Trevor. "Copyright and the Invention of Tradition," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26.1 (Fall 1992): 1-27.
- Sitter, John. Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
- Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
- Sorensen, Janet. The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
- Weinbrot, Howard D. Britannia¿s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Wilson, Kathleen. "Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720-1790." Eighteenth-Century Studies, "The Public and the Nation" 29.1 (Fall 1995), 69-96
- ---. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785. Cambridge UP, 1996.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
No UG version |
| Keywords | EaR |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Robert Irvine
Tel: (0131 6)50 3605
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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