English 102 intends to introduce students to literature across the long eighteenth century. Our course will explore the various popular genres of the period including poetry, drama, the early novel, and essay. Though less readily available for contemporary readers, many of the authors and texts of the eighteenth century remain in contemporary pop culture. Even more, many of our own contemporary understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality emerge at the forefront of the eighteenth-century literary imagination.
N.B. This course is reading and academic writing intensive.

Essential Questions:
In this course, we will collectively evaluate the limits of a British home and a British home away from home. Of course, any home is connected to identity, and this is assuredly the case for the growing British Empire during the long eighteenth century. Colonization by the British Empire worked to not only control 20% of the globe, but project an understanding of Britishness across that 20%. Our texts, written entirely by British or American authors, will investigate what happens to Britishness in global settings. This course will evaluate the racial, gender, and sexual considerations reflected in texts that take to the extents of the British Empire. We will attempt to define home and abroad in an eighteenth-century context.

Authors may include: Aphra Behn, John Dryden, M.G. Lewis, Olaudah Equiano, Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Rochester, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and James Thompson.