British Literature - Spring 1999

Professor: Jody Greene
Time: T Th 8-9:45 AM
Location: Porter 144

A final examination will not be required for this course.

Required texts, available at the Literary Guillotine

* Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Wimsatt and Brady. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

* Maria Edgeworth. Belinda. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

* Katharine M. Rogers, ed. The Meridian Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women. Meridian, 1994.

* Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1995. [Note: you must have this edition, because we will be reading both texts]

* Jane Austen. Emma. Norton Critical Editions, second edition, 1993.

Description:

This course will offer students an introduction to British literature from 1744 to the end of the eighteenth century. Although the course is chronologically designed to pick up where "The Age of Dryden and Pope" leaves off, no prior knowledge of eighteenth-century literature will be assumed.

The readings in this course are organized around the broad theme of "Independence." We will begin by reading Samuel Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, rejecting Chesterfield's offer of literary patronage and asserting Johnson's ambitions as an independent author. A reading of a selection of Johnson's works will provide us with an opportunity to test just how successful he was at achieving the independence he championed.

With the waning of Neoclassicism in English literature, and with the enormous expansion in opportunities for professional authorship, authors in this period began to look forward, rather than backward, for literary models and themes. They dispensed with some of the more rigid rules of literary practice that had flourished after the Restoration, turning their attention to new forms and new subject-matter. At the same time, revolution was in the air throughout Europe and the European colonies, and the period saw an explosion of writing about independence, personal liberty, and what we now call "human rights."

We will explore the relationship between changes in literary institutions (authorship, publication, circulation, reading practices) and social transformation (women's rights, abolition, revolution) throughout the second half of the century. Among our primary concerns will be the slow death of "the stigma of print" and the (related) emergence of the woman author. We will also pay close attention to the decline of satire as the most prevalent mode of social criticism and examine which new genres and which new authorial voices came in to fill the void left by the demise of satiric writing. Finally, we will attend to those places where the new rhetoric and practice of "independence" failed or faltered, and ask who was left behind by this period of rapid social and literary transformation.

Readings:

* Samuel Johnson, selected periodical prose, "The Life of Pope," "The Life of Savage," "London," "The Vanity of Human Wishes," Rasselas, "Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language"

* James Boswell, from The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, LLD

* Johnson' essay "Taxation no Tyranny" and Burke's "American Taxation," along with the Declaration of Independence and selections from ThomasPaine's Common Sense

* Letters, poems, and diaries from the "Bluestockings," or learned lady writers, including Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, and Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbauld.

* Selected poems by working-class women poets including Mary Collier and Mary Jones

* Fanny Burney's play, "The Witlings"

* Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men with selections from Paine's The Rights of Man

* A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

* Maria Edgeworth's novel of educated women and the paradoxes of empire, Belinda

* Selections from the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, former slave and abolitionist

* Selections from Edmund Burke's speeches on the government of British interests in India

* Austen's Emma

Instructor: Michael Warren

Anticipated Meeting Times: Monday and Wednesday 5:30-7:15 pm; and Tuesday 7-10pm.

The focus of this course is on nine or ten important plays written between 1945 and the present and on the social, historical, and theatrical circumstances of their original performance. To illuminate their relation to English political and artistic life we shall view a number of films--some versions of playtexts, some original works--that present a kind of parallel history to the plays (the film showings will be on Tuesday evenings and are part of the class requirements).

The course moves from drawing room drama of the forties, through theatre of the absurd and new realism of the fifties, into the forms in which political and social issues have been explored in the last twenty thirty years.

Plays to be studied will be chosen from the following (the list differs significantly from that in the catalog entry). The availability of texts will be a factor in my final selection of plays for study:

Terence Rattigan, The Browning Version

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

John Osborne, Look Back In Anger

Harold Pinter, The Caretaker

Joe Orton, What The Butler Saw

Edward Bond, Bingo

David Hare, Plenty

Brian Friel, Translations

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls

Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good

Among the films viewed will be versions of The Browning Version, Look Back In Anger, and Plenty; some productions of plays made for TV; and the feature films Betrayal (a version of a Harold Pinter play), The Ploughman's Lunch, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

Two papers, each of seven to eight pages in length, upon topics to be negotiated with the instructor.

Students are strongly encouraged to read other plays by these authors, and other plays by playwrights of the period; and to see other British films of this period.

Textbooks will be ordered at The Literary Guillotine on Locust Street.

Revised 8/3/04.