Course Details
Country:
United Kingdom
Institution:
University of Kent
Course Title:
Bodies of Evidence: Reading the Body in Eighteenth Century Literature
Course Number:
ENGL6330
Course Description:
This module explores the eighteenth century fascination with bodies and the truths (or lies) bodies were supposed to reveal. Our focus will be on the ways in which the body is read and constructed in eighteenth-century literature and how these readings and constructions reflect various concerns about class, race, gender and sexuality. Efforts to regulate the body (particularly the female, plebeian and racialised body) became the focus of many reformers and philanthropists in the period who sought to recuperate the productive (and reproductive) labour of idle or transgressive bodies to serve the nation's moral and financial economies. Other writers, however, emphasised the body's potential to work against social and cultural norms, focusing on events such as the masquerade, in which women dressed as men and aristocrat’s as chimney sweeps. Through the course of this module we will examine a range of literary representations of the body which seek both the
Language:
English
Approved Equivalent:
Pending For Approval
Attachment Files:
