Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in 18th-Century England
ENGL 314
Fall 2017 not offered
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In the newly booming consumer culture of 18th-century England, people were constantly buying and selling things--bespoke suits and manufactured trinkets as well as prostitutes and slaves. This course will explore the period's circulating bodies as they were passed from hand to hand, valued and revalued, used, abused, and discarded. We will trace processes of circulation in 18th-century novels and poetry and listen as the "things" themselves tell stories: in the period, commodities, prostitutes, and slaves all wrote memoirs (or had ones imagined for them). We will read these texts alongside contemporary debates about economics, abolition, and women's rights, and we will return again and again to fundamental questions about personal identity, individual agency and passivity, commodification, objectification, and the very limits of the human. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (CBST-MN)(ENGL) |
Major Readings:
Anon., THE HISTORY AND ADVENTURES OF A LADY'S SLIPPERS AND SHOES
Aphra Behn, OROONOKO
John Cleland, FANNY HILL: OR, MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE
Daniel Defoe, ROXANA
William Hogarth, HARLOT'S PROGRESS
George Lillo, THE LONDON MERCHANT
Alexander Pope, THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
Olaudah Equiano, THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO
Selections from writings by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, James Grainger, William Cowper, Hannah More, Ignatius Sancho, Karl Marx, and others.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Several short papers, a presentation, and a final research project |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course meets the English major requirements of Literary History II and Literatures of Difference and contributes to the British Literature concentration requirements; it offers the Research Option for Honors thesis writers. |
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