Non-Fictional Prose: From Dryden to Burke
John Richetti profile
W 9-12
Although much attention in recent years in eighteenth-century studies has shifted toward fiction, the great literary achievement of the long 18th Century (from the 1660 Restoration to the French Revolution) was traditionally centered in its non-fictional prose, which literary historians saw as a process of fashioning the clear and efficient idiom that became modern discourse in learned disciplines, belles lettres, and popular journalism. We will read a range of writers across the spectrum of subjects and disciplines, encompassing literary criticism, periodical journalism, moral and political polemics, philosophy, history, biography and "life writing" (such as journals and diaries), and travel writing. Our challenge will be to trace developments in literary style and rhetorical effects even as we seek to deal with those moral, literary critical, ideological, and historical issues such writing addresses. Readings will be substantial but only in a couple of instances involve lengthy works. The authors we will read include the following: Dryden, Shaftesbury, Swift, Mandeville, Addison and Steele, Defoe, Johnson, Boswell, Hume, Gibbon, and Burke.
updated 2006-10-18
