Course Resources Archive

This module forms part of a group of modules which provide a chronological survey of English literature from 1700 to the present. It introduces students to a selection of novels, poems, plays and literary journalism, written and published during the ‘long’ eighteenth century, from 1660 to 1832. 

The first half of the module covers text published between 1660 and 1790. Topics are likely to include:

The Restoration: William Congreve’s The Way of the World

Satire and the City: early c18th poetry, including Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock

The c18th Novel: Daniel Defoe’s Roxana and Frances Burney’s Evelina

The Revolution Controversy: extracts from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The second half of the module covers texts published between 1790 and 1832. Topics are likely to include:

Romantic poetry: selected poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Literary Journalism: essays by William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb

Romantic Orientalism: Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater

The Gothic Novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

A student passing this module should be able to:

1.identify and understanding a variety of texts and genres of the literature of the long eighteenth century;

2.read closely a variety of texts and genres of the long eighteenth century in conjunction with critical debate and historical contexts;

3.analyse and critically evaluate complex ideas with confidence;

4.produce sustained written argument and communicate effectively.

The Library Catalogue contains full details of the current reading list for this module. Further details may also be found in the Module Guide.