Session 1: Early and Medieval Britain: From Roman Britain to the Coming of the Tudors
Session 2: Britain in the Renaissance
Session 3: Britain in the Ages of the Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
Session 4: Empire and After: Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Britain in the Ages of the Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
In this part of its historical cycle, British Studies At Oxford concentrates on the period from 1688 to 1837, from to the end of the Georgian period.
The so-called “Glorious” or “Bloodless” Revolution effectively triumphed over absolutist tendencies in the English monarchy, but this event can stand for decisive developments in many more fields than the political. A recent book on the subject by Patrick Dillon overstates by being called The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World (2006), but the title indicates something real: representative government is assured in the following decades, England and Scotland unite to form the United Kingdom, the first and second British empires grow astoundingly, and all of these political developments contribute to the profound shocks of the American and French Revolutions in 1776 and 1789. Revolutionary change extended well beyond these spheres: in science, this is the age of the Newtonian revolution and the development of transforming new technologies, and of the agricultural, industrial, and urban revolutions, and Britain becomes a new kind of highly urbanized society in the process.
Such profound developments are complemented in the evolution – even perhaps revolution – of philosophy and the arts. The period includes the startling and instructive contrasts between the arts in the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the development of a new audience for culture, composed of the “middling sort”, and the development of competing accounts of human consciousness, understanding, and imagination. Britain depicts its new status, power, and aspirations in stunningly beautiful neoclassical architecture, but also explores its history through a fanciful neogothic.