ENGLISH 748 / The Invention of Britain

3 unit(s)

P. Walmsley

This course will consider how literature of the eighteenth century expressed a radically new nationalism in step with Britain’s rise as a modern imperial nation-state. We will look at a wide range of texts - literary criticism, essays, utopias, novels, poems, travel books, political tracts, and economic treatises – and we will consider such issues as the renewed importance of pastoral, the sustained resistance of Scottish ethnicity, the articulation of an English literary heritage, and elevation of women within the national allegory of progress.