see Enlightenment Gallery
  see Hogarth and Print Culture
 

The Age of Dryden and Pope, in British Literature--roughly 1660-1740--is also the age of the Restoration of the monarchy, after the rule of Cromwell, Parliament, and the Puritans, the age of the so-called "Glorious Revolution," when James II was dismissed from the throne and replaced with good Protestant monarchs--his daughter and Mary and her husband, and then his younger daughter Anne.  It is the age of the great and infamous prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, who is credited with originating the saying, though not the idea, that "every man has his price."  It is the age in which both the Industrial Revolution and the Literacy Revolution began to have their long-reaching effects.  It is an age, especially, when women as well as men played an important role in aristocratic society, in politics and diplomacy, and in poetic and dramatic literature, as well as prose narrative and satires.

In this course we will focus our attention especially on six major writers, three men-- Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and three women--Aphra Behn, Anne Finch (Lady Winchelsea), and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  We will also take a special look at the theatre, in which for the first time women were allowed to earn their livings, and try to understand what Restoration comedy does, and does not, tell us about Restoration life.  In the latter part of the period, we will ask especially how the writers see and enact the role of the writer--a solitary person in his or her own study--as a participant in both domestic and public life.  Most of the works read will be poems or plays, but we will read two works of prose fiction, Behn's Oroonoko, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

The following books have been ordered for this course:

1. John Dryden, Selected Poetry and Prose, Modern Library edition, 1969.
2. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings. World's Classics. 1998.
3. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, ed. R. Quintana, 1960.
4. Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy. World's Classics. 1996.
5. Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry, ed. Pat Rogers.  Oxford, 1998.