4 Sanborn House
Department of English
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Literature of the Long 18th Century
19th and 20th Century British, Irish, Caribbean and Postcolonial Literature
Transatlantic Circulations between Ireland, the Americas and Africa
Contemporary Philosophy, the Philosophy of History and Globalization and the Novel
"The Secret History of the Circum-Atlantic Novel"
English 31: Reason and Revolution 11F
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 Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 32: The Rise of the Novel 12W
A study of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English novel, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen. The course will look at the major sub-genres of the period, including criminal biography, scandalous memoirs, epistolary fiction and the Gothic novel. It will also explore the relationship between narrative fiction and the changing cultural landscape of a period defined by commercial uncertainty, imperial expansion, and the threat of revolution. Finally, and most importantly, the course will ask why the novel became so central to modern conceptions of subjectivity, sexuality, social cohesion and transgression. Readings may include work by Daniel Defoe, John Cleland, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Dist: LIT, WCult. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
