"Freedom of Movement and Freedom of Spirit" - Restoration and 18th Century Literature

Overview of class

• By the eighteenth century, visitors to England were commenting with interest on the new commodity culture that seemed, remarkably, to be visible across classes. Everyone was shopping, spending and dressing in ways that suggested new attitudes to freedom of movement, as well as new freedom of personal expression. From the Restoration era, public parks, public baths, gardens and theaters became experimental environments for the production of new identities. This course will consider the emerging sense of personal freedoms that arises from the new freedom of movement and of expression. We'll also ask how fiction of this period represents characters who are more emotionally volatile, and how the social and economic change us related to ideas of personhood and identity. Texts include plays (Aphra Behn, The Rover; William Wycherley, The Country Wife; Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers; William Congreve, The Way of the World; and George Farquhar, The Beaux Stratagem) and novels (Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey; Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling), plus key excerpts from critical texts, including Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Thorsten Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Classes.

Class Materials (Required)

• - Aphra Behn, The Rover. Oxford World Classics, 1995. Ed Jane Spencer. ISBN: 978-0-19-954020-4
  - William Wycherley, The Country Wife and Other Plays. Ed. Peter Dixon. Oxford World Classics. ISBN: 978-0-19-955518-5
  - Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers. Gale ECCO Literature and Language. ISBN: 978-1170455166
  - George Farquhar, The Beaux' Stratagem. (In The Recruiting Officer and Other Plays). Ed. William Myers. ISBN: 978-0192822499
  - Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141441429
  - Laurence Stern, A Sentimental Journey. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0140437799
  - Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling. Oxford World Classics. ISBN: 978-0192840325
  
  There will be selections from philosophy and critical readings in addition to these primary texts: these include selections from Arjun Appadurai's Social Life of Things; Marcel Mauss. The Gift; Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments; Locke's Two Treatises of Government; Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests.

Class Notes

• The instructor for this course is Jane Taylor. Jane Taylor is a Visiting Writer in Residence in the Center for Writing Arts for Fall Quarter 2011. She is a writer, scholar and curator from South Africa. For the past several decades, in addition to writing fiction and plays, she has been involved in cultural critique and public scholarship. She has published two novels, Of Wild Dogs (winner of the Olive Schreiner fiction prize in South Africa) and The Transplant Men (grounded in the first heart transplant, an event that took place in South Africa). Taylor has been commissioned by Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt to write a version of the so-called "missing" Shakespeare play, Cardenio. She has taught at the University of Chicago, and in South Africa at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Western Cape; she has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and at Cambridge Universities, and has received Mellon and Rockefeller Fellowships.

Class Attributes

• Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
  
  

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