ENGL 527

Fall 2017 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in 18th C Literature

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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.

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ENGL 527 class schedule data for fall 2017
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	46745	Lecture-Discussion	R	1:00PM -2:50PM	R	113 English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/28/17-12/13/17 Section Title: Women's Friendship 18th C Lit Section Info: Topic Section R: Women’s Friendship in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell argued that the best way to fight centuries of neglect of female education was to separate women, at least temporarily, from an abusive world by creating “Protestant nunneries” around the country. Here middle-and upper-class women could escape the “tyranny” of custom and the trivial pursuits prescribed for their sex, substituting Descartes and the Bible for the dubious pleasures of their looking-glasses and unreliable male flattery. Don’t look to men for your self-worth, Astell repeatedly urged her female readers. Look instead to yourselves and to admirable women friends, who will help you perfect both faith and judgment, and enable you to create a heaven on earth—a garden “where there are no serpents to deceive you.” Astell’s striking comments about women’s friendship find echoes and correspondences throughout the long eighteenth century: in the friendship poetry of Katherine Philips (“Orinda”), Anne Finch, and Mary Chudleigh; in novels envisioning utopian female communities such as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman or Maria (1798); and in epistolary novels foregrounding relationships between women, including Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761), and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777). While scholars of the eighteenth century have long lamented the gender and other exclusions implicit in Jurgen Habermas’s classic account of the bourgeois public sphere, our understanding of eighteenth-century publics and counterpublics remains limited by the neglect of female friendship as a topos of Enlightenment letters. This seminar explores various imaginings of female friendship and solidarity in eighteenth-century fiction, poetry, and educational and philosophical treatises, and situates these representations in the context of recent debates within feminist and public-sphere theory. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.