ENG 302: English Literature II: Restoration Through Revolutions; or, Transatlantic Reckonings

ENG 302 covers English language works between the time period between 1660, the year of the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne, and 1815, the year of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. The literary forms that emerged in this "long" eighteenth century reflected the centrality of the colonial project to the making of the modern world: for example, the tense political union of England, Scotland and Wales; the expanding Transatlantic slave trade; settler colonialism in North America; the resistance of enslaved and Indigenous peoples in Haiti and the Americas; and revolutions (or, depending on your perspective, counter-revolutions) in the nascent United States and France. Together, we will explore how long eighteenth century literary works reflected and negotiated these histories.