Department of English
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18th Century Literary Studies
The eighteenth-century program allows students to discover through literary and cultural studies one the most vital and challenging periods of history, when the novel rose, the Battle of Books raged, cross-dressed pirates sailed the seas, and sinners worked overtime to rouse the temper of an angry god. From the pleasures of English coffeehouses to the surprisingly unpuritanical shores of the New World, our eighteenth-century program offers new ways to think about old characters: poets and prostitutes, madmen and missionaries, sages and savages.
At Purdue we define "eighteenth-century English literature" in its longest and broadest sense: faculty and students in the area are engaged in research and teaching that encompass colonial America beginning in the early 17th-century, 18th-century British and American literature, and early 19th-century literatures. We consider the British as well as the Black Atlantic; New England and New Spain; London and Surinam. Our methodologies and critical approaches help to define new approaches to the field, allowing for substantive responses to new texts as well as new approaches to familiar books. Our members publish and teach on the history of print culture, the construction of the public sphere, theatricality, aesthetics, cultural contact, colonial identities, transatlantic slavery and racism, empire, and revolution. We stress interdisciplinary work (our faculty are affiliated with the Theory and Culture Studies program in the English Department, Women?s Studies, American Studies, and the Philosophy and Literature Program). In addition, the transatlantic character of our curriculum gives students the opportunity to work on both British and American topics, although students may devote themselves to one national tradition or the other. Graduate classes combine the study of literature with work on history, culture, and theory, and are frequently cross-listed with courses in American Studies and Theory and Cultural Studies.