Department of English

Passionate outbursts, embarrassing blushes, and anguishing tears—the Age of Sensibility has it all. In this course we will examine the literature of feeling from its birth in the Scottish Enlightenment to Graveyard Poetry, Sentimental fiction, Gothic fiction and drama, and early Romantic prose and poetry. As we work our way through these texts, we will explore the philosophical, political, performative, and psychological significance of emotion, paying particular attention to how these works teach the reader to feel. Authors may include Jane Austen, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Gray, David Hume, Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Mackenzie, Hannah More, Ann Radcliffe, Adam Smith, Charlotte Smith, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Helen Maria Williams, and William Wordsworth. Course requirements include active participation, reading responses, a presentation, two papers, and a final exam.