Browse Hierarchy ESH7047: Sociability: Literature and the City 1660-1780

"This module focuses on the representation of the city in the literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century. The general research question this module investigates is the interaction between literature and history: in particular how is urbanism - the formation of a new and distinct affectual structure associated with the structural transformation of urban life in the early eighteenth century - manifested in and by the literary. The module will examine how this cultural and historical transformation can be read in and through experiments in literary genre and style in the period (including forms of popular satire, verse, periodical essays, prose fictions and the novel, as well as painting and cartography). The module will focus on four key debates, which may include topics such as the city and its mock poetic forms, the coffee-house, the Spectator essays, and women writers, and will engage in key critical debates in twentieth-century city theory."