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British Studies At Oxford

About Seminars

Course Availability

9 May 2008

8:30-9:30 Seminar Choices

 

A         ART AND ARCHITECTURE          Visual Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain

A wide-ranging introduction to the fine arts of eighteenth-century Britain. Beginning with the accession of Charles II (from 1660) and closing with the French Revolutionary period, the course will set out the major trends in British society, culture and art patronage and evaluate the status, ambitions of and influences on British artists at this time. The content of individual classes will vary between surveys, themes and individual artist careers. Sample subjects include: genre surveys (portraiture, history painting, landscape, caricature); major influences (the court of the French kings, the lure of Italy and the Grand Tour, war and empire) the careers of key painters and sculptors (Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough); Royal and aristocratic patronage and the creation of a national school of art (the Society of Artists, the Royal Academy).

Christine Riding (Tate Gallery, London)

 

B         HISTORY      The Making of the British Raj

This seminar explores how “the jewel in the crown” was fashioned during the course of the long eighteenth century. It will examine, among other issues, the transformation of the English East India Company from a minor trading venture into the paramount political and military power in India; the “nabobs” who won an empire abroad and helped keep alive a corrupt political order at home; the slow process by which Parliament exerted increasing control over the affairs of the East India Company; and the humanitarian and reform movements that created a new kind of empire in the early nineteenth century. Attention will also be directed to Indian contributions to both the Raj and domestic affairs in Britain.

Lynn Zastoupil (Rhodes College)

 

C         HISTORY      From Classical to Romantic: British Reactions to European Culture, 1750-1830

This seminar will trace the impact of continental European movements in thought, culture and the arts on British patrons and the British “public” at a time of rising nationalism and robust patriotism. At the outset, we shall examine the place of British writers such as Edward Gibbon and David Hume in the developments which were taking place, in a European context, in the writing of history. One of these was a transformation in the study and appreciation of the medieval past, and we shall set the increasingly “romanticized” vision of the Middle Ages beside the rise of a more scientific approach to the legacy and records of what Gibbon called an “age of barbarism and superstition”. Many of the tendencies in British culture at this time were reactions to, or rejections of, movements originating in continental Europe. We shall take the case of music as an example, looking for both similarities and differences between British and continental patronage, performance and the appreciation of music by the public. The enormous popularity of Handel and Haydn – both from German-speaking countries – in England will be considered and the rise of a taste for Romantic music among English patrons and audiences will be investigated. The course will be supported and illustrated with material from the visual arts, music and historical literature.

Malcolm Vale (St John’s College, Oxford)

 

D         HISTORY      Towns and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Rapid economic change, industrialization, and population growth gave urban life vastly increased importance in eighteenth-century Britain. Britain’s cultural epicenter shifted away from the court and the great house into the urban milieu. This seminar will examine urban society in the period, with attention being paid to such topics as social structures and class, political organization, cultural life, the physical environment, poverty, crime and gender as well as British society’s fascination with and fear of the town.

Rosemary Sweet (University of Leicester)

 

E          HISTORY      Britain in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1837

A study of the political, economic, religious, intellectual, and social development of Britain from the mid-eighteenth century to the accession of Queen Victoria. The challenges of the American and French revolutions; the controversies surrounding the reign of George III; the rise of Britain to world power status and its long rivalry with France; the union with Ireland; far-reaching agricultural, industrial, and transportation developments; and the reform of Parliament and other institutions are some themes to be explored.

Leslie Mitchell (University College, Oxford)

 

F          HISTORY      From Newton to Faraday: Science and Culture, 1687-1835

Eighteenth-century Europe absorbed the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and made them part of a broader culture. Within the period, English science, and especially scientific instrument making, attained a world-wide renown, as the Laws of Nature discovered by Newton formed the basis of a national understanding of the physical world. It was an age in which Newton, Herschel, Captain Cook, Davy, and Faraday changed the way in which people thought, and an age when industrialists such as Arkwright, Boulton, and Watt transformed the physical circumstances of life.

Allan Chapman (Wadham College, Oxford)

 

G         LITERATURE           British Romanticism

This seminar surveys the prose, poetry, and cultural milieu of the British Romantic period. We read selections from the poetry of Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Percy Shelley. To (re)produce a more inclusive understanding of the era, we examine Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Maria Edgeworth’s instructional short stories for children, Letitia Barbauld’s “On Female Studies,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, no matter what the gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation of the author, each text is examined by means of close, detailed explication and textual analysis. In documenting how the broad wake of Romanticism continues to reach us today, we conclude with Tom Stoppard’s modern play, Arcadia.

David Ullrich (Birmingham-Southern College)

 

H         LITERATURE           Carpe Noctem: From Light to Darkness in Eighteenth-Century Literature

As the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the “light” of reason and the external world as defined by Newton and Locke, gives way to a more subjective, introspective emphasis on imagination, there is a parallel shift in poetic imagery, inverting the values of “light” and “dark.”  To quote one critic, “evening becomes the time of lyric utterance.” This course will begin with Milton’s “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and follow the deepening gloom from the curtain of “Universal Darkness” at the end of Pope’s Dunciad through such poets as Anne Finch, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and William Collins, with excursions into the Gothic novel and Burke’s theory of the sublime. We shall conclude with some Romantic examples of what Keats calls “embalmed darkness.”

Jennifer Michael (Sewanee – The University of the South)

 

I           LITERATURE           Mind the Gap! Satire in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Anyone who has watched The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or even The Simpsons has a good idea of what satire is and how it operates. The same is true for those of us who enjoy political cartoons, or cartoons in general. Satire functions by exploiting or creating ironic gaps – between what someone says and what he or she does, between real situations and the ideals we measure them by, between the tone of voice and subject matter, between what we expect and what we get. The roots of modern satire lie in the visual and verbal satires of the Restoration and long eighteenth century. Through plays, mock epics, mock pamphlets, engravings, cartoons, and even buildings and landscapes, this seminar will examine the delights of satire, but also its limits and liabilities.

John Tatter (Birmingham-Southern College)

 

J          POLITICAL SCIENCE         Faith, Reason, and Politics in English and Scottish Thought

Particularly in light of the convulsive, and bloody, brew of religion and politics in the seventeenth century, British thinkers searched for ways to separate and moderate these two essential elements of human society.  This seminar will explore the intellectual foundations of religious toleration and the separation of church and state, as well as the more general relationship between reason and religious belief, concentrating on John Locke’s subtle political and theological project of religious toleration and David Hume’s radical philosophical assault on religious belief.   

Stephen Wirls (Rhodes College)

 

K         MUSIC           Music and Music Making in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Britain’s prominence and wealth during the eighteenth century made “the land without music” an increasingly powerful cultural centre. This seminar will study both the music written and performed and music’s place in British culture of the period. The arrival of Handel in London in 1710 defined music making in eighteenth-century Britain and firmly established opera in capital. Handel’s success and ability to navigate issues and tastes of his time led to the English oratorio tradition that continued through Haydn’s visits to London in the 1790s. Foreign musicians, particularly Germans, influenced music making in England throughout the century, both in court and church as Handel’s instrumental and vocal music was joined by the popularity of the music of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. Dissenting religious groups in England created their own body of music under the influence of the same composers, exporting both music and faith to colonial America.

Timothy W. Sharp (Rhodes College)

   

11:15-12:15 Seminar Choices

 

L          ART AND ARCHITECTURE          British Visual Art in the Romantic Period

This course will focus on British art from 1780 to 1840, a period of dramatic social and political change across Europe. Ideas of spontaneity and feeling began to transform European art, encouraging artists to explore the extremes of human experience and Nature itself. Beginning with the years leading up to the French Revolution, the course will examine such developments in British art and culture, in particular the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on national and artistic identity. The careers of key artists and genres will be focused upon, such as Constable, Turner, Lawrence, Fuseli and Blake, history painting, portraiture, genre, landscape and satire, as well as the following themes and influences: artistic responses to literature, in particular Shakespeare, Byron and Walter Scott; ideas of the Sublime; Romantic medievalism and Orientalism; innovations in popular culture, such as voyage narratives, the panorama and theatre spectacles; and Franco-British cultural interchange after the Battle of Waterloo.

Christine Riding (Tate Gallery, London)

 

M        ART AND ARCHITECTURE          Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The eighteenth century was a period of immense architectural creativity in Britain. From Christopher Wren to John Soane and from Nicholas Hawksmoor to Robert Adam: some of the greatest architects of all time worked here, and in the process they rebuilt the nation. Many of their finest buildings can be found in and around Oxford. In this seminar we will trace the development of architecture in the long eighteenth century, exploring the buildings, the people who built them, and the reasons why they were built. And we will go further: architecture in Georgian England was not just about the vagaries of fashion or simple personal taste. It was also critically linked to ideas about politics and morality; psychology and religion. It was a product of wider social, cultural and economic changes. This course will touch on all these aspects of British building in the eighteenth century; it will consequently provide both an introduction to Georgian architecture and to eighteenth-century society more generally.

William Whyte (St John’s College, Oxford)

 

N         HISTORY      The Lion’s Share: Britain and the Slave Trade

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as many as twelve million Africans were transported by Europeans in brutal fashion across the Atlantic, to be sold into hereditary slavery.  By 1700 Britain was already the single largest slave trading nation and by 1800 British ships had carried a staggering 3.25 million Africans as their cargo.  Yet Britons also took the lead in agitating against the slave trade and, later, slavery, successfully campaigning for the abolition of the former in 1807 and the latter in 1833.  This seminar explores these and other aspects of British involvement in human trafficking during the eighteenth century.  The deep relationship between sugar consumption at home and slavery abroad will be addressed, as will be the ties between slave trading and the expansion of Britain’s economy and the growth of its port cities.  We will also explore the impact of the slave trade and slavery on Britain, including the emergence of an Anglo-African population that included prominent intellectuals and political activists by the end of our century.  The abolitionist movements will also draw our attention, as we take up the religious and philosophical trends that contributed to abolitionism and the manner in which abolitionists shaped modern British national identity and inspired a later generation of Victorian reformers.

Lynn Zastoupil (Rhodes College)

 

O         HISTORY      The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century

“A man who has not been in Italy”, said Samuel Johnson, “is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.” In this course we will be examining precisely why so many British men (and women) travelled to Italy; what they saw, what they did, and what they brought back to Britain. Eighteenth-century art, architecture, music and literature were all heavily influenced by the Italy and the classical antiquities to be found there, and the impact of the Grand Tour on contemporary taste and fashion is particularly evident in the great houses of eighteenth-century Britain.  But we will also be considering other questions in this course such as the construction of national identities and national stereotypes and the practicalities and dangers of eighteenth-century travel.

Rosemary Sweet (University of Leicester)

 

P          HISTORY      From Newton to Faraday: Science and Culture, 1687-1835

Eighteenth-century Europe absorbed the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and made them part of a broader culture. Within the period, English science, and especially scientific instrument making, attained a world-wide renown, as the Laws of Nature discovered by Newton formed the basis of a national understanding of the physical world. It was an age in which Newton, Herschel, Captain Cook, Davy, and Faraday changed the way in which people thought, and an age when industrialists such as Arkwright, Boulton, and Watt transformed the physical circumstances of life.

Allan Chapman (Wadham College, Oxford)

 

Q         Frankenstein Meets Snow White: Cross-currents in British and German Romanticism

This seminar focuses on a comparative study of British and German romanticism, 1770-1832. These dates serve to introduce the seminar’s agenda: 1770 marks the birth of Wordsworth, Beethoven, and Hegel and 1832 is, typically, considered the “end” of romanticism in Britain (with the Second Reform Bill) and in Germany (the death of Goethe). The seminar will explore recurring motifs, themes, preoccupations, and phobias shared by these two literatures. We will examine the gothic tale, the cult of the poet, the so-called “folk” literature (English ballads and German märchen), the restorative powers of nature, orientalism, and other points of convergence (and divergence) between these two, fascinating literatures. British works comprise about two-thirds of the seminar and include the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein.  The German literature (all in translation) includes several of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tales, exotic “tales of wonder” by Tieck, Brentano, and Hoffmann, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

David Ullrich (Birmingham-Southern College)

 

R         LITERATURE           “The Dead Poets' Society”: Mourning and Memory in Neoclassical and Romantic Verse

This course will examine the varied responses to death, especially the deaths of poets, which inform certain Neoclassical and Romantic poems. Texts whose close scrutiny will ground our discussions will include Dryden’s “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew” and “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham”; Pope’s “Epitaph on John Hewet and Sarah Drew” and his epitaphs on several poets, including himself; Johnson’s “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet”; Gray’s “On the Death of Mr. Richard West” and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Collins’s “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson”; Wordsworth’s “Remembrance of Collins”; and Shelley’s “Adonais”. We will address these poems’ representations of the physical realities of death, their meditations on fame and oblivion, and their haunted returns to and revitalizing of the words of earlier poets, most importantly, Virgil and Milton.

Pamela Macfie (Sewanee – The University of the South)

 

S          LITERATURE           Artful Wilderness: Literature and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century

If you were designing the green space around your house, what would you base your decisions on concerning the choice and placement of flowers, shrubs, and trees? Would you include a pond, a patio, a gazebo? A birdbath, a fountain, a gazing ball, a garden gnome, a statue of St. Francis? How would your choices reflect your values, your aesthetic sense, your income? Your answers to these questions will be based in part on your attitudes to nature and art, how you define “natural” and “artificial,” and how you value the two. The poets, philosophers, and landscape architects (often these were the same people) of the “long eighteenth century” wrestled with similar issues – about the creative tension between nature and art, about how we define beauty, about the place of humanity in the natural world and the responsibility humans have in preserving and improving our surroundings. This seminar examines the developing and often contradictory concepts of landscape and nature during the period through close reading of literary and philosophical texts and, crucially, through visits to some of the most influential (and notorious) English landscape gardens of the period.

John Tatter (Birmingham-Southern College)

 

T          LITERATURE           William Blake

From the quintessential English hymn “Jerusalem” to the very name of the 1960s rock group The Doors, Blake’s influence on our culture is inescapable; yet in his own time he was virtually unknown in the literary and artistic worlds. This seminar will explore the poetry and designs of Blake in the context of his revolutionary era. Our study of his verbal and visual works, and in particular of the integration of the visual and verbal in his “Illuminated Books,” will be enhanced not only by digital resources but by the collections at Tate Britain, the British Library, and the Ashmolean Museum.

Jennifer Michael (Sewanee – The University of the South)

 

U         POLITICAL SCIENCE         Liberation of Mind and Body in the Thought of John Locke

John Locke’s work changed the way people thought, and think, about an amazing range of problems, from human rights and religious belief to child rearing and ideas themselves.  His influence, in particular, on the American revolutionaries, preachers, and constitution makers is difficult to overestimate.  This seminar will examine his comprehensive rethinking of human thought, morals, and institutions through four major works: The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Second Treatise of Government, A Letter Concerning Toleration, and The Reasonableness of Christianity.   Stephen Wirls (Rhodes College)

 

V         POLITICAL SCIENCE         British Responses to the American and French Revolutions

What did the American and French revolutions mean for British society? This course examines the effects of 1776 and 1789 on British politics and culture, and the ways in which these crises occasioned new thinking about the meaning of Britain’s own “Glorious Revolution” among radicals and conservatives.  Special attention will be given to the influential writings of Tom Paine and Edmund Burke.  Daniel Cullen (Rhodes College)

 

W        MUSIC           Making a Joyful Noise? The Evolution of the English Choral Tradition, c.1549-1900

The English choral tradition is steeped in over 800 years of history, and may still be experienced in a number of Britain’s cathedrals and churches. Safe, sedate, and uncontested, then? Hardly: the choral tradition has been inextricably bound up with England’s turbulent religious and political history, to the present day. In an historical survey, this seminar will quickly chart the evolution of music in the English church from before the Reformation, through responses to changes in liturgy and attitudes towards church music as England was influenced by different waves of Protestantism, to the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean church music, dominated by such figures as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. The main focus, however, will be from the decline of musical endeavour during the English Revolution and the republican Commonwealth, its rebirth at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the near collapse of the tradition in the eighteenth century, and, finally, the establishment of the “modern” English choral tradition, led by the so-called “Oxford Movement”, in the nineteenth century. The course will offer a bias on the music itself, including performance practice and the interpretation of music manuscripts and earlier notations, though previous musical experience is not required.

David Skinner (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge)

 

 

ADDITIONAL SEMINAR (1:15-2:15)

 

ENGLISH      Shakespeare: Page & Stage

A study of some of Shakespeare’s plays, integrating discussion of the texts, visits to performances in Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, or London (the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), and subsequent discussion of the relationship between text and performance. The plays to be studied will be announced when theater programs are confirmed. The additional fee for this course includes tuition, travel to, and tickets for the additional performances attended. (1:15-2:15) 

Pamela Macfie (Sewanee – The University of the South)

 

 

Structure of the Program

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Seminars