The period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1660-1789) promoted individual rights, attacked superstition and advanced science, dramatically expanded literacy and publishing, brought women as readers and writers into a burgeoning literary marketplace, and created the public sphere. Yet the era also massively increased the trans-Atlantic slave trade, devised new forms of racism and anti-feminism, and established European colonialism as a world system. This course will examine British literature that confronts these complexities. We’ll read novels like Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that portray encounters between Europeans and the non-European “Other”; poems by Alexander Pope and Mary Wortley Montagu that explore the nature of women and femininity; and texts that find the limits of Enlightenment reason in uncertainty, strong passions, and madness.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: None

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered; Spring