Metaphysics and Melancholy: Philosophy/Literature 1689-1764 (U01378)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : LLC-3-U01378

Setting out from Locke's Essay, the course will chart the erosion of religion by a newly energised relationship between the philosophy of "ideas" and literature in the eighteenth century. Topics covered will include the context of Locke's Essay; the rise of a rhetoric of "imagination" in Addison and Akenside; the influence of Locke's political philosophy upon Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; the erasure of the division between "poetic" style and "philosophic" content in Hume; the ideology of the beautiful / sublime in Burke, Thomson and the "Gothic" sensibility of Walpole. One of the principal themes of the course will be the way in which empiricism fostered a culture of subjectivity which, while encouraging a heightened emphasis on imagination in literature, in many ways proves to be self-undermining. At the same time attention will focus on the way in which the apparently subversive and revolutionary implications of Locke's philosophy of matter and sensation came to find a home in Burke's conservative aesthetic, leaving the Romantics to tease out the political contradictions of eighteenth-century empiricism.

Entry Requirements

? Costs : Essential course texts

Subject Areas

Home subject area

English Literature, (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Schedule G)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 3rd year

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

? Other Required Attendance : 1 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

This course aims to extend students' knowledge of the relationship between philosophy and literature in Britain through a close examination of how these two disciplines influence each other during the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century.