Restoration and 18th Century Lit.

Some of you out there ask me what I'm reading for class.  I offered up my Shakespeare syllabus last Spring, so here's the reading list from the period just after him. 

Unit One: The (Radical) “Comedy of Manners”

9/13     William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)

            George Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676)

9/20     John Dryden, Marriage à la Mode (1671)

           John Dryden/William Davenant, The Tempest, or the Enchanted

Island

(1667)

9/27     Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

Unit Two: Neoclassical Time/Space Experiments

10/4     Jean Racine, Phaedra (1677) [h]

            Roland Barthes, from On

Racine

[h]

            John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671) [h]

            (optional) Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence”

10/11   William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)

Unit Three: High Augustan Forms

10/18   John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, chap. 2 [h]

            John Gay, Polly (1729)

Unit Four: New Tragedy

10/25   George Lillo, The

London

Merchant (1731)

            Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (1768/1781) [h]

            Robert Hume, “Before the Bard” [h]    

Unit Five: Farce and “Laughing” Comedy

11/1     Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)

            Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)

            Goldsmith, in McMillan, 489-492

11/8     Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)

                                                        The Critic (1779)