Spring 2020 Courses ANNOUNCED!
Enlightenment Sexualities *This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement. ENG 8460 Dr. Joseph Drury CRN 32794 Tuesday 5:20-7:20pm The age of Enlightenment was also the age of the libertine. A freethinking philosophy of pleasure and individual freedom, libertinism emerged in seventeenth-century France before crossing over to England with the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War. Turning their bakcs on what they saw as repressive religious and moral dogmas, libertine authors drew on contemporary philosophical materialism to write witty, cynical, and sometimes obscene works celebrating sexual promiscuity and hedonism. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, libertine ideas began to find their way into Enlightenment political projects aimed at restoring human nature to its "primitive" purity or emancipating women from patriarchal oppression. At the same time, however, libertinism and sexual deviance of various kinds also...