English Literature: Literature and Culture 1700-19 MA

This new MA pathway examines the transformation of English literature across a two-hundred-year period which saw the emergence of a modern public culture in the eighteenth century, the rise of Romanticism at a time of revolution and war, and the social and cultural changes of the Victorian era. The pathway combines the close reading of a wide range of male and female authors with interdisciplinary study of the broader culture, examining literary innovation and experiment alongside developments in philosophy, politics, science and commerce. Topics studied may include the popular culture of the coffee house and tavern, the history of the senses, periodical culture, Gothic, the impact of Continental aesthetics, genre theory, the culture of religious dissent, representations of gender and selfhood, media technology and the book trade, and the urban spaces of London. Literary and cultural turning points are set against historical developments such as the growth of the British Empire, the French Revolution and its aftershocks, the Peterloo Massacre, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the trial of Oscar Wilde. The pathway offers new perspectives on neoclassical and Romantic poetics and on later movements such as Aestheticism and Decadence, while analyzing the productive diversity of British culture in one of its most dynamic phases.