ENGL 540

Studies in the Literature of the 18th Century: Area Course

Units: 1.5

This year: Pleasure in Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

An investigation of pleasure, rhetorical and otherwise, in writings from 1660 to 1800, including the libertine writers of the Restoration (Behn, Wilmot, Dryden, Wycherley), the satirists of the Augustan period, the erotic studies of Eliza Haywood, the antic fictions of Laurence Sterne, Diderot, and de Maistre, as well as explorers of sensibility and sentiment, celebrators of nature (Rousseau, Darwin), and pioneers of the pleasures of the imagination, whether Gothic (Radcliffe) or mythic (Blake).

Graduate course in the English program administered by the Faculty of Graduate Studies.