Drawing on 'Augustan' and on 'Romantic' texts, that is, on texts written in the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, this unit teaches students ways of understanding how a literary culture changes. The texts will be by writers including Pope, Swift, Johnson, Maria Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Keats. Students will have the opportunity to study - and write on - a number of films in relation to the texts.
The unit will focus on how writers reflect, and even help to create, change in social attitudes to reason, imagination and madness, political and social order, the natural world, and empire. Extracts from theoretical writings by Foucault, Bakhtin and others will be used as providing models for explaining how literary change happens.
