EGL 216 - (210) Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Course Units: 1

(Not offered in 2014-15) A survey of some crucial-and hotly contested-ideas that emerge in the work of six major 18th-century writers: Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft. These will include the definition of human nature, the western world’s view of itself, the “noble savage” and colonialism, the classical tradition vs. “modern” Europe, deism, attacks on Christianity, the empirical challenge to the old order, the legacy of the French Revolution, and feminism. CC: HUL