A survey of major literary figures from the Augustan Age through the rise of the English novel and the Age of Romanticism: Pope, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The course explores the shift from neoclassical interest in poetry and translation to the middle-class novel and, with the Romantics, to a renewed interest in a poetry of ideals and sentiment.
The seminar classes will focus on the in-depth study of some important literary works touched upon in the course. The poems, novels, and plays discussed in class cover the period between the early 18th century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.