Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of literature and culture between c. 1660 and 1830, Texts may be drawn from a variety of media, forms, and genres, and may address issues of gender, race, class, national identity, and more. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Poetry and Privilege in the Eighteenth Century

For the literate elites of the early eighteenth century, poetry was part of everyday life. Educated men were expected to be able to write poetry in Latin, and to produce witty rhymes in English as party games. In fact, they were expected to be able to write “occasional” poetry—songs, jokes, birthday tributes, praise of a patron—at the drop of a hat. But poetry also had a more central public role for readers and writers: political propaganda, philosophical and religious debates, social satire, and obscene writing often took poetic form.

Since poetry was everywhere and so culturally central, others who had something to say took it up as well, and that’s where the trouble began. Many elite women were trained from an early age to write poetry and exchange it with others in manuscript form, and at the start of the century there was a surge in poems criticizing the unfairness of the marriage system for women. Women of the middling and lower social orders were increasingly able to publish their poems through the subscription method, or through magazines and newspapers, leading to their being attacked as scribbling women or worse. And it wasn’t just gendered voices that called out to be heard: marginalized Roman Catholics, labouring-class writers, and African slaves took up the pen as well. Most of these writers used print as their medium, but some chose manuscript exchange or oral performance.

In this course we will listen to many of those voices, as they clamoured to be heard in the space of poetry. We will pay attention to what they had to say and how they said it, but also to whether anyone listened. We will focus on poetry’s role in this culture, on the opportunities and barriers encountered by those writing it from a range of social positions, and on how they collectively changed—or failed to change—their society. We will work to make eighteenth-century poetry part of our lives as it was for people of the time—learning to be comfortable reading it, copying out favourite poems, even writing imitations of it on contemporary themes.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of this course, the committed student will:

1. Be familiar with the very wide range of eighteenth-century poetry
2. Be knowledgeable about the contexts out of which it arose and the challenges various poets faced in reaching an audience
3. Have improved skills in reading and analysing forms of poetry (and even writing in some of those forms)
4. Be able to reflect on the criteria by which writers’ works are (or should be) judged and how such judgments are related to gender, class, race, medium, etc.
5. Have experience in reading, analysing, and responding to literary criticism
6. Have increased skill in literary critical writing

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: