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English and Creative Writing

18th Century and Romantic Literature

The literature of this fascinating period starts with Pope and Swift and Defoe, charts the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and heralds, towards its end, the rise of Romanticism and the remaking of English poetry. The period is also the age of the novel: Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, Tristam Shandy, Frankenstein and the works of Jane Austen fall within its boundaries, telling between them the story of the novel’s evolution from novelty to canonical genre.

During a period sometimes referred to as the ‘long eighteenth-century’ (approximately 1688-1830) Britain became a global power, growing rich on the profits of an international trade in cotton, sugar and enslaved people. The period’s writers respond powerfully to the cultural, political and moral challenges posed by this transformation of nation into superpower in a literature that is rich, creative and endlessly thought-provoking.

This is a vibrant area of research in the department, looking at a wide variety of specialisms, from the birth of science to the classical foundations of the novel, from biographies that rethink the period’s social networks to the mapping of roads, from devotional poetry to opium use, from gothic terror to tubs of laundry, from the politics of the body to the shirts of New Romanticism, and from plants in the Caribbean to shrubberies in Jane Austen.

Works on 18th Century and Romantic literature by our departmental staff