ENGL 357K

Restoration and the Eighteenth-Century Genre (3 credits)

Instructor: Tiffany Potter
Section: 002
Term: 2

Eighteenth-Century Theatre: Staging the Nation and the Self

After the silence of the Puritan Commonwealth, London’s stages burst into social prominence with the restoration of Charles II, contributing to the cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through such conflicting elements as noble heroics, brilliantly witty smut, political subversion, historical revisionism, and some rather explicit sex.  This course will engage questions of identity, community, and performance in eighteenth-century England.  This approach will allow us to consider the ways in which English playwrights both echoed and reinscribed ideas of heroic masculinity and femininity, sexuality and marriage, intellectualism and passion, violence and its burlesques, as well as the ways in which the dramatic genres of the era could turn spectatorship into readership and make the political into the (very) personal.  We will examine the distinctions and continuities among these issues through comedy and tragedy in the heroic, satirical, libertine, and sentimental traditions. Our last play will examine how these values of performative identity and community translate into other national and racial contexts in Robert Rogers' 1767 play Ponteach, or the Savages of America.  

Texts:

• Canfield, ed. The Broadview Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Concise Edition)
• Rogers, Ponteach, or the Savages of America (University of Toronto Press)  
• out-of-print plays in Cancopy course packets

Recommended:

• Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms
• Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Penguin)