A. PRIMARY TEXTS with editorial matter, obligatory reading. All texts except those marked with an asterisk (*) are reproduced in the Unipub course compendium ('ENG2303 English Literature in the Age of Enlightenment'), of which each student is expected to own a copy. (Available at Kopiutsalget, Akademika).
Aphra Behn (c. 1640—89).* Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave. A True History (1688) in Oroonoko and other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman, Oxford World Classics)
Daniel Defoe (1660—1731)The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702)
Susanna Centlivre (c. 1670—1723). * The Busybody (1709) in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, ed. Melinda Finberg (Oxford World’s Classics, 2001) (pp. 75—143)
Joseph Addison (1672—1719) and Richard Steele (1672—1729). 15 Spectator essays (1711—12) listed by periodical number and topic:
- 1 Mr Spectator (Addison)
- 2 Introducing the Spectator Club (Steele)
- 10 The aims of The Spectator (Addison)
- 49 On coffee-houses (Steele)
- 50 The four Iroquois sachems (Addison)
- 69 The Royal Exchange (Addison)
- 70 On native literary genius: the ballad of Chevy Chase (Addison)
- 71 A sevant’s billet-doux (Addison)
- 101 On the posterity of The Spectator (Addison)
- 106 Sir Roger de Coverley’s country house (Addison)
- 119 On town and country manners (Addison)
- 411—14 On the pleasures of the imagination (Addison)
Alexander Pope (1688—1744).
- Windsor-Forest (1713),
- Epistle to Bathurst (1731)
Jonathan Swift (1667—1745).
- An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England (1711)
- * Gulliver's Travels (1726) ed. Albert J. Rivero, Norton Critical Edition, 2002.
John Gay (1685—1732). * The Beggar’s Opera (1728) ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell, Penguin Classics.
James Thomson (1700—48)
- A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727)
- A Hymn on the Seasons (1730)
Stephen Duck (1705—56). The Thresher’s Labour (1730)
Mary Collier (1690?—c. 1762). The Woman’s Labour (1739)
Samuel Johnson (1709—84). Letter to Lord Chesterfield, 1754
Thomas Gray (1716—71). Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730—74). The Deserted Village (1770)
B. TEXTBOOK (obligatory reading)
W.A. Speck: Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics and Culture 1680-1820, 1998. London and New York: Longman. chapters 1-7 (pp. 1-128).
Recommended supplementary (not obligatory) reading (‘survey’ textbooks on relevant aspects of the period):
John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
J. A. Downie, To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678—1750 (London: Macmillan, 1994)
James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700—1789, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1993)
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000)
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, rev. 1990)
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700—1789 (London: Longman, 2003)
Margaret Ann Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660—1780, Routledge History of English Poetry vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)