Aims
This course aims to:
- introduce you to four fascinating 18th-century lives
- equip you to understand the 18th-century roots of modern life-writing and ideas of ‘self’
- reveal the shaping influence of Nash, Equiano, the Duchess of Marlborough and Boswell on the Georgian public sphere
Content
This five-day course draws on accounts of the lives of four leading 18th-century public figures to chart the origins of many of our modern ideas about biography, autobiography, the self, public and private – indeed, modernity itself. Each fascinating in their own right, the four personages that form the cast-list of this course have much to tell us about place, race, gender and rank in 18th-century society and culture. Accounts of their lives – from their own pens and from the pens of their contemporaries – give us a striking view of the modern public sphere at a formative time in its own life.
Presentation of the course
This course, which is a British history course, will be taught across five seminars. Each of the first four seminars will examine a different 18th-century life, with the fifth seminar bringing those lives together in a set of reflections on 18th-century society and culture as a whole. Seminars will involve a mixture of lecture, class discussion and group activity. The style of the seminars is informal, friendly and relaxed, and questions are actively encouraged at all stages!
Course sessions
- Richard ‘Beau’ Nash at Bath
- Olaudah Equiano and the abolition of the slave trade
- Sarah Duchess of Marlborough: court and class
- James Boswell in London
- Life writing, the eighteenth-century self, and the modern public sphere
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
- to deepen your knowledge of four 18th-century lives
- to reveal the 18th-century origins of modern life-writing and ideas of the self
- to see the shaping influence of Nash, Equiano, the Duchess of Marlborough and Boswell on the Georgian public sphere
