ENGL 527

Spring 2013 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in 18th C Literature

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of eighteenth-century studies or consent of instructor.

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 527 class schedule data for spring 2013
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32265	Lecture-Discussion	T	3:30PM -5:20PM	R	309 English Building	Markley, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/13-05/01/13 Section Title: Climate & Culture 1600-1830 Section Info: Topic Section T: Climate and Culture 1600-1830 1850 marks the end of the so-called ?Little Ice Age? in Europe, a period when colder temperatures over northwestern Europe led to volatile weather patterns, increased storminess, shorter growing seasons, cycles of poor harvests, hunger, food riots, and even starvation. For more than two hundred years, major English writers from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and Austen charted, in subtle and fascinating ways, the intersections of climate and literary culture. In approaching writing about the environment before and during the development of Romantic understandings of the natural world, this seminar extends the boundaries of ?ecocriticism? and interdisciplinary studies. While no specialized knowledge about ecology is required, we will discuss some of the ways in which early-modern and Enlightenment attitudes toward climate and environment shape our own perceptions of the natural world in the twenty-first century. During the course of the semester, we will read a wide range of texts, including travel accounts, landscape and georgic poetry, natural histories, and natural history writing. The seminar will offer you the opportunity to study specific climatic episodes, such as the El Nino of 1740-44, which produced the last mass starvation in Europe, and the ?Year without a Summer,? 1816, the consequence of a volcanic dust cloud, which brought food riots to France and Britain, a refugee crisis to New England, and led to Mary Shelley?s writing Frankenstein. You are encouraged to develop independent research projects that focus on the interplay between literary texts and climatological history, and your seminar paper should reflect your interests in the period, approaches that you find useful and exciting, and the needs of your graduate career. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.