LFU:online

This VU will concentrate on texts published in just one year – 1760 – with the aim of using this concentration to unfold important movements in European literature and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century. In 1760, two texts that had a remarkable impact on European literature were published: Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, as well as the first letters written by Oliver Goldsmith as Lien Chi Altangi, later collected as Citizen of the World, Frederick II. Bericht des Phihihu, Sendboten des Kaisers von China in Europa. Aus dem Chinesischen and the German and the English translation of an epistolary novel published a year earlier, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Lettres de Milady Juiette Catesby, à Milady Henriette Campley, Son Amie. Reading these texts and their contemporary reception allows us to follow the literary and aesthetic traditions that partly reach back to before the beginning of the eighteenth century and partly fully develop their impact only at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, but that all were present simultaneously in the year 1760.

See Learning Outcome.

Contextualisations by the lecturer, close reading of 1760 texts in class, individual work on aspects of literary or aesthetic lines of tradition.

Oral contributions, some short and one longer written contribution during term.

Reading will be assigned in class.