ENG274

This course critically compares four writers of the eighteenth-century European tradition who on first glance seem to have little in common: Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ann Radcliffe. Students consider these writers’ gender performance, satire, lexicography, political philosophy, confessional autobiography, Gothic novels, and painterly travelscapes. How does their choice of genre serve as social commentary, (a)moral exposé, or visual escapism? Does their work revise our definition of an eighteenth-century writer? Drawing on critical gender studies, political philosophy, literary criticism, and theories of the Baroque help make sense of how such unlikely comparisons allow us to read this eighteenth-century episteme as an example of moral "enforcement." Recommended background: ENG 232 and 243.