Mar 28, 2024  
2012-2013 Academic Catalog 
    
2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 323-01 - Studies in English Lit:1660-1798 (Spring)

4 credits (Spring)
On Saying Yes: Desire and Consent in the Eighteenth Century. In this course, we will examine a wide variety of Restoration and eighteenth-century British texts that represent sexual desire and consent across the development of modern moral standards and gender norms. We will read plays, poems, novels, pamphlets, and legal and medical cases from this period that pit the idealized free expression of sexual desire and gender non-conformity against rising imperatives of modesty, chastity, and heteronormativity. Our authors will include Aphra Behn, William Wycherly, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Laurence Sterne, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Students will do historical research on eighteenth-century representations of gender and sexuality, and present their discoveries to the class. In another short paper (5-6 pages), students will perform an analytical reading of a short section of text as it pertains to eighteenth-century debates about the aesthetic and rhetorical properties of realism. By the end of the semester, students will produce a substantive research paper (10-12 pages) on some aspect of literary representations of sexuality during this period.

Prerequisite: ENG 223 , ENG 224  or ENG 273 .
Instructor: Shanafelt