ENGL 21 Reason and Revolution
Was there a British Enlightenment? In the age of the American and French Revolutions Britain seemed to hold steady. But in the literature of the period there are many social and literary struggles which took their tolls in the madness and suicide of writers such as Smart and Chatterton, the difficulties of attaining creative freedom, and the emergence of new literary forms such as the Gothic. This course will trace the fortunes of writers such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke as they grapple with the anxieties of their time. We will also consider how women thinkers and novelists such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft forged new roles for themselves, and we may include studies of the novel of political paranoia such as Caleb Williams, written by Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin.