Courses

The literature of the eighteenth century is often imagined as a corpus of excessively long novels about excessively polite people writing love letters and fainting. But as often as you encounter refined sensibility, you are almost as likely to encounter nasty practical jokes, bodily fluids, pornography and streets flowing with sewage, sometimes all in the same text. This course aims to use two opposite emotions, desire and disgust, to unsettle popular understandings of eighteenth-century literature, and to try and understand what drew readers in, and what repelled them. What happens when the Age of Reason, or the Age of Politeness is not so reasonable or polite? In what ways did eighteenth-century authors understand attraction and aversion, and how did they narrate it? How were desire and disgust gendered, and how did these ideas inscribe themselves onto bodies? By asking these questions, we can start to understand not only what eighteenth-century readers found desirable or disgusting, but also what they found disgusting about sexuality, and what delighted them about disgust.