ENGL 7058 The Unwritten, Unread, Unspeakable Eighteenth Century

Critical efforts to expose the dark side of the " Enlightenment" have yielded an impression of eighteenth-century literature as a monument to hegemony. And yet the " canon" that has given us this impression is only a fraction of the era's print culture, and the methods of analysis scholars have traditionally brought to bear on it has imposed an artificial narrowness on what we believe can reasonably be said about even the era's most well-known works. A great deal of the " literary" record of the eighteenth century exists outside the written word--in art, material culture, music, spoken word, and theatrical performances. Wildly popular genres like periodicals, sermons, and sacred history are rarely read now not because they were of minor importance but because they have since gone out of fashion. Texts we simply dont want to talk about--from the pornographic to the politically uncomfortable to the seemingly boring--change the picture when they are included in the frame. This course blends eighteenth-century literature's usual suspects with their culturally influential but less known cousins in order to ask, what does it really mean to study the written word?